Table

of contents
INTRODUCTION

Ratings

GNOSIS

What are we talking about?

What gnosis is not

The teaching of gnosis

Gnosis, a state and a teaching

Transfiguring the created without denying it

Mary, guardian of gnosis

Ratings

MAN, IMAGE OF GOD

As his look

And in his likeness

The image is unalterable, the resemblance must be restored

The reality of man is found in the archetype

From spiritual to biological

Ratings

THE DEIFICATION OF MAN

Become what we are

The Word is the maker of gods

The Body of Glory

The feel of the bones

Her face beamed

 Ratings

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF THE WORLD

what death destroys

I saw a new heaven and a new earth

Creation groans in labor

Ratings

THE STAGES OF REVELATION

The divine pedagogy

The first revelation

The second revelation

The Third Revelation

Ratings

HOW TO DO?

How to undertake our divinization?

man side

God side

Ratings

KNOW YOURSELF

Prepare to receive

Bringing order out of chaos

Self-knowledge or self-contemplation

A radiant crystal crowded with reptiles

Ratings

THE YOUNG

The body has its place

 The transition to food

What should humans eat?

The lifting of food restrictions

Ratings

THE SILENCE

Learn to be silent to listen

The silence of the soul

objective silence

spiritual silence

Ratings

THE BREATH

From the breath of God to the breath of man

Between the drops of time

Ratings

THE TRAN SPARENCE OF THE BODY

When the priest becomes an actor

The right gesture

sacred space

How to clean the unconscious?

The secret of tears

Ratings

MYSTERIES

water, blood and flesh

Baptism

the eucharist
 Ratings

WHEN THE SPEECH CATCHES FIRE

Scripture study

The literal meaning and the spiritual meaning

The germination of the inner man

Ratings

PRAYER

Prerequisites

Words are deceiving

Where to pray?

Prayer: what for?

How to do?

insistence

short prayers

perpetual prayer

Ratings

THE WAY OF THE HEART

The place of the heart

heat and fire

The end of things

Ratings

BLOOD MEMORY

The whole man is renewed

The body must follow

From bodily substances to blood

 The work of regeneration

Our father in heavens

Ratings

CAN BLOOD OVERCOME DEATH?

Divine blood, universal antidote

The right gesture

Ratings

AND MAY THE MORNING STAR RISE IN YOUR HEARTS

soul pregnancy

The embryo of immortality

And the morning star rises in your heart

Ratings

THE ROSARY

The alliance of the rose and the cross

What is it about?

Rhythm

The invocation of the name

The meditation of the mysteries

Ratings

HEALING OUR DEAD

Trans-generational psychology

The prayer for the dead

The weight of the ancestors

Family tree work

The Liberation Process

 Ratings

SECRET CHRISTIANITY, documents for study

1. Interview of NA Motovilov with Seraphim of Sarov

2. How to ignite a continual flame in your heart

3. The cloud over the sanctuary

4. Blood Memory

5. Heredo

6. Consecration to Mary

Ratings

LIST OF BIBLICAL ABBREVIATIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY
 Thanks

The only ambition of this presentation is of an educational nature. I tried to bring together
what was scattered. I readily acknowledge my debt to the authors cited in the bibliography,
particularly Louis‐Marie Grignion de Montfort, Léon Daudet, Boris Mouravieff, Jean‐Gaston
Bardet, Robert Amadou, Jean Borella and Jean‐Marie d'Ansembourg. I thank Jacques Rauffet
for his scholarly proofreading of the manuscript.

A first version of this book was published by Rafaël de Surtis and Arma Artis under the
title Alchimie du Feu celeste .
 SOME WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Astrology

Introduction to the judgment of the stars with a treatise specific to the beginning of things
(1558), Claude Dariot, annotated and commented by Denis Labouré and Chantal Étienne,
Pardès, 1988.

The Origins of Astrology , preface by Jean-Pierre Bayard, Le Rocher, 1997.

Cours Pratique d'Astrologie , preface by Mike Edwards, Chariot d'Or, Saint-Chef, 2004.

Hourly Astrology , preface by Robert Zoller, Chariot d'Or, Escalquens, 2006.

Your Astrology in a few clicks , Micro-Application, Paris, 2006.

Esotericism

The Qabalistic Teachings of the Golden Dawn , preface by Nick Tereshchenko, Teletes,
1991.

Martinès de Pasqually (Martinezism and Martinism) , SEPP, 1995.

Alchemy of celestial fire , preface by Robert Amadou, Rafaël de Surtis, Cherves, 2001.
Second edition Arma Artis 2005.

Secrets of Egyptian Freemasonry , prefaces by Sebastiano Caracciolo, Robert Amadou and

Rémi Boyer, Chariot d'Or, Saint-Chef, 2002.

Cagliostro and the hermetic tradition , at the author, Saint-Étienne, 2004.

Practical Alchemy Course , at the author's, Saint-Étienne, 2004.

Contact your guardian angel , Rafaël de Surtis, Cordes-sur-Ciel, 2007.

Masonic Testament , Rafael de Surtis, Cordes-sur-Ciel, 2008.

From the same publisher

 
Denis Labouré, Contact your guardian angel – Ritual of Pelagius, hermit of Majorca , 2011.

Sébastien Morgan, Becoming yourself , 2013.

 Denis Laboure

SECRET CHRISTIANITY
The Body of Light
 

The Mercure Dauphinois

© Editions Le Mercure Dauphinois, 2009, 2013

4, rue de Paris 38000 Grenoble – France

Such. 04 76 96 80 51

Email: lemercuredauphinois@wanadoo.fr

Website: lemercuredauphinois.fr

ISBN: 978-2-35662-016-3
to Stéphane, companion on the way
 INTRODUCTION
 

Several traditions claim that some masters – including in the 20th century in the Tibetan
world – left this land without a trace. Their bodies having disappeared, they were neither
cremated nor buried. According to the famous Tibetan Book of the Dead , those yogis of
above average ability who have completed the full practices are, upon stopping their
breathing, invited to dissolve into rainbow light 1 .

Western tradition is no exception. Cagliostro and Martines de Pasqually, the two best
instructors of the 18th century, made Enoch and Elijah the patrons of their Rite (Egyptian
High Masonry for the first, Knight Masons Elected Coëns of the Universe for the second).
Why ? Of Enoch and Elijah, Scripture says they did not die. They were both taken up to
heaven. They passed from the biological to the spiritual without going through the usual
death. Enoch, son of Jared, reached the age of 365 and died without leaving a mortal trace 2 .
Elijah ascended to heaven carried away by a whirlwind or chariot of fire 3 .

This experience shows that we do not have a spiritual body and a biological body which
would overlap each other. We are a body of Light. But this light has hardened, frozen,
crystallized due to a cosmic drama that tradition (Jewish, Christian or Hermetic) compares
to a fall. This passage is a sublimation of being into a new mode of existence. It is the
survival of a being who is no longer in space-time, who is alive, but in another way; which
dominates the cosmos instead of being dominated by it.

In Le Grand Œuvre , Grillot de Givry summarizes the goal:

“But I have said enough for you to know that you must henceforth form for yourself a
mystical body, which will replace your visible body in all your actions in order to make
useful use of your immaterial forces. And so you will live in the hyperphysical; and that is
the Way. »

The body of Light is the culmination of this process:

"Roger Bacon said: 'The body must become spirit and the spirit must become body. This
is the solution of the work. To realize it, your own body, kindled by the philosophical fire,
corroded by the ardent water of contritions, must reach such a degree of purity that it
becomes truly immaterial. Then, transfiguring itself as on a Tabor 4 , it will become
unalterable; it will no longer be an impediment to the spiritual life, but on the contrary, like
the glorious body, it will participate in it and will itself contribute – oh prodigy! - at work. »

If the Latin Church had clearly taught the process of divinization , the magician and the
priest would have been one man. The churches would not spurn in horror the hermetic
bloodlines that save teachings that were at the heart of Christianity. The initiatic orders
would not vociferate against the sacraments and prayer which they lack in order to respect
the ideal of their founders.

Christianity has nothing to envy to other traditions. For him, “the last enemy destroyed is
death” 5 . The resurrection of Christ represents the apotheosis of the spiritual journey.
Christianity offers a total course. The teaching of this course comes from a perfectly
orthodox gnosis – a science –. This science transmits the necessary instructions for the
passage from the biological to the spiritual, from the physical body to the luminous body.

This book brings together what is scattered. He presents those instructions which will
lead the man of good will to his spiritual birth. Waiting for the mage and the priest to be
one man again.
 Ratings
 

1. The Tibetan Book of the Dead , trans. and com. Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam
Trungpa, the Courier du livre, 1979, p. 78.

2. Gn 5.24 and Heb 11.5.

3. 2 K 2, 11.

4. This is an allusion to Mount Tabor, where tradition places the episode of the
Transfiguration (Matthew 17.1-9; Mark 9.2-10, Luke 9.28-36).

5. 1 Cor 15, 26.

 GNOSIS
 

As for Mary, she kept all these things carefully, pondering them in her heart.

LUKE 2, 19
 What are we talking about?
 

There was a Christian gnosis. However, in institutional Christianity, gnosis has a bad
press. Surprisingly, since the word " gnosis appears twenty‐nine times in the New Testament
! Christ himself says:

“Woe to you jurists [those who teach the Torah], because you have taken away the key of
knowledge [gnosis] ! You yourselves did not enter; and those who wanted to enter, you
prevented them .

Those who, out of prejudice, reject gnosis 3 , therefore risk big 4 ! With Jean Borella 5 , to
whom this chapter and the accompanying notes owe everything, let's explore this word
more closely.

In Greek, gnosis means knowledge. It is rarely used alone. It almost always requires a
noun complement (knowledge of something), while episteme (science) can be used in an
absolute sense. This is why gnosis means, not knowledge as a result, but rather the “action
of knowing”.

Let's explore the sapiential literature of the Old Testament 6 . For the first time, the name
gnôsis and the verb ginôskô (which translates the Hebrew yd' ) acquire a religious and
moral meaning. In the sense of knowledge whose author is God or the Sophia . This is how
the Bible speaks of the “God of gnosis” 7 .

to the texts 8 , we are not yet dealing with gnosis in the sense of interior and deifying
knowledge, which is a state. Not that the thing does not exist in the Old Testament, but the
word "gnosis" does not receive such a meaning there. We must therefore wait for the New
Testament and particularly the 1st and 2nd letters to the Corinthians, the letter to the
Colossians and the 1st letter to Timothy. There appears for the first time the word gnosis used
in the sense that we understand it here. Christianity as a whole is a gnosis: " To know and
adore God in spirit and in truth ", and no longer only through sensible or ritual forms.

The word gnosis 9 belongs to Christianity since it was used in this sense, for the first time,
by the apostle Paul. Paul denounces a false name and not a false science. He feels the need
to defend the word gnosis as such. True knowledge is also knowledge par excellence, the
only knowledge to which we must reserve the word gnosis .

In Paul is the first denunciation of the “pseudo-gnosis ” 10 which current scholars call
“Gnosticism”. This distinction between gnosis and gnosticism, Paul is not the only one to
make. Irenaeus of Lyon, in Against Heresies , does not denounce gnosis. As the original title
of his work announces, he combats "false name gnosis" to establish "true gnosis". Clement
of Alexandria – who died around 215 – fights Gnosticism. But he proposes to teach us "true
gnosis", that which comes from Christ through the apostolic tradition, and which the study
of Scripture and the sacramental life bring to life in us. Origen speaks to us of this "gnosis of
God" which few men possess and by which Moses entered into the divine Darkness 11 . We
could evoke Dionysius the Areopagite, Gregory of Nyssa and other Fathers.

What gnosis is not

 

As many parables teach, men do not all have the same understanding of the Christian
Mysteries. Not everyone grasps its deepest meaning. According to the Gospels, Christ
dispensed teaching at three levels: to the crowd (in parables) 12 , to the twelve apostles 1 3 ,
finally to Peter, James and John. From the elementary catechism to Master Eckart, there are
14 degrees of understanding and experience without us being able to speak of a spiritual

level, of which God is the sole judge.

– “To you the mystery of the Kingdom of God has been given; but to those who are
outside everything happens in parables, so that they may look and they do not see 15 … Does
the lamp come to be put under the bushel or under the bed? Isn't it so we can put it on the
lamp post? For there is nothing hidden that must not be revealed and nothing has remained
secret except to come to light. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear ! 16 It was by a great number of parables
of this kind that he announced the Word to them as they could hear it; and he did not speak to them without a parable, but in

particular he explained everything to his disciples 17 . »

Christian gnosis is not reserved for a closed elite. There does not exist a secret Church
inside a visible Church, with particular rites reserved for its dignitaries. Access to a deeper
understanding does not belong to a committee of initiates who would co-opt each other
within a secret society. Although the Gnostic experience remains interior, it is offered to
everyone. The interior Church is not a place; it is the experience that results from the work
done to penetrate the teachings of Christianity. To access it, one must take the trouble to
explore these teachings. Christian gnosis is open to everyone, provided they make the
effort to enter!

 
 The teaching of gnosis
 

There existed a pre-Christian gnosis whose representatives did not use the term to
identify themselves. Then Clement of Alexandria presents it to us both as a secret tradition
taught by Christ to a few apostles 18 , as consisting in the interpretation of the Scriptures and
the deepening of dogmas 19 , as the perfection of the spiritual life and the chewing of the
divine Word 20 .

What happened ? In a way, Christianity reveals the inner mystery of Judaism. It brings to
light, in full light, the esoteric laughter of the Mosaic religion, of what it carries within it
that is most secret. For the six hundred and thirty-two prescriptions of Jewish law, Jesus
Christ substitutes the love of God and neighbour. The multitude of ritual obligations and
their complexity are replaced by faith in Christ and participation in the sacraments. The
Sabbath law can be transgressed, if the good of man requires it.

Gnosis is sacred knowledge by its very nature. What counts is the religion of the heart,
that which concerns the interiority of being, because “ the kingdom of God is within
yourselves ”. It is not outward worship, reduced to its own exteriority, that pleases God.

"The hour is coming when it will not be on this mountain nor in Jerusalem that you will
worship the Father. […] But the hour is coming, and it is now, when the worshipers will
worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for such are the worshipers whom the Father desires .
»

Christian gnosis is characterized by its unity and simplicity. The divine intermediaries
are reduced to the uniqueness of the Word who became flesh (John), mediator between
God and men (Paul). With respect to pre-Christian doctrines (whether Jewish, Greek,
Egyptian or Near Eastern ), this is a great novelty. Christ is the gnosis of God 22 . This gnosis,
having taken on a man's body, manifests itself to all men, realizing a metaphysical shortcut.
All degrees of knowledge and reality are recapitulated in Christ, who offers a direct path to
the intimate knowledge of God.

Christ is pierced by the spear of the centurion: blood and water spurt out. The interiority
of God spreads outward and communicates itself to everything. The whole Creation finds
itself bathed in the death and blood of Christ. It is the gnosis of the Father spread and
communicated.

Gnosis, a state and a teaching

  

There is gnosis each time the intelligence pursues its effort to know beyond what it
naturally experiences. True gnosis is a spiritual, ineffable and interior state. The name
“Gnostic” does not designate belonging to a religious school; it designates the spiritual state
23 of one who has reached the end of the Christian path. By receiving the Holy Spirit, he can,

as Paul says, " search to the depths of God . "

But gnosis is also a doctrinal corpus. What was its content ? Jean Borella proposes to see in it
the speculative schema underlying the dogmatics of Christianity. This dogmatic is
summarized in the Creed of the Apostles (Credo) , the content of which was taught in secret
and orally until the 4th century.

The specificity of gnosis resides in the conjunction of these two aspects. To state dogmas
without giving the means of grasping their meaning, without providing the intellect with
the means of understanding them, is to act in vain. We understand the importance that the
word "gnosis" took on in the eyes of the first Christians, and later, of the first Fathers of the
Church. In him was formulated the internal verification of the revealed doctrine to which
they adhered. Gnosis was the possibility for theology to be something other than a simple
rational exercise. It was the gateway to an experience of dogmatic truth.

Transfiguring the created without denying it

 

No one is exempted from learning reality as the world lets us know it. True interiority
must overcome exteriority by transfiguring it, not by denying it.

We will understand what it is all about, and I am using Jean Borella here, if we consider
the body as an instrument of our presence in the world. Through the body, we are present
in the world of bodies. This presence, of which we believe to be the master since it
identifies itself with ourselves, is a passive and undergone presence. My bodily presence is
my visibility, and my visibility is not mine. It belongs to all eyes without my knowledge and
without my being able to do anything about it. No one is master of his bodily presence.
Even more, to be physically present is not to be master of this presence.

What happens in the Resurrection of Christ? The risen Body is an irruption of the
glorious nature of the created within its tenebrous and opaque modality. The body of Christ
is always the instrument of his presence in the world of bodies. But, by a radical change,
this presence is no longer submissive and passive. The soul that inhabits this instrument is
master of it and disposes of it as it pleases. Christ can actualize the bodily model of his
presence as he decides and sees fit. His relationship with the bodily medium of his presence
is transformed. All the relations which unite the corporeal medium to the rest of the bodies,
that is to say to the whole world and to the conditions which define it, are changed. Christ is
no longer seen, he makes himself seen.

The glorious Christ is not above the sensible world. Simply , it is no longer subject to the
conditions of the corporeal world. His bodily presentification becomes an extension of his
spiritual reality. With the risen Christ, the spiritual person can or cannot effect this
presentification, as freely as the thought of man can, in its ordinary state, produce or not
produce this or that concept or feeling.

How can we doubt that this Jesus Christ communicated to those he met a gnosis, a state
of interior and deifying knowledge without common measure with what they had
experienced until then? This spiritual state 26 , Paul designates it by the name of gnosis . He
sees in it the perfection of faith .

Mary, guardian of gnosis

 

When the intellect is stripped of all special knowledge, it attains a state of perfect
nakedness and pure transparency. Become what it is in its bottom, nothing in it is opposed
to its investment by the divine gnosis. God knows Himself in this intellect and as this
intellect, which becomes one with the immaculate Conception that God has of Himself. This
is why gnosis is of Marian essence; she is there to bring the Word to the world. Because she
is the servant of the Lord. Married

"keeps all these things carefully, pondering them in his heart . "

Jesus put on human nature; Mary was clothed with the divine nature. She gives birth to
the gift of Intelligence in whoever she wants. It was she who instantly understood the
words of the angel Gabriel. Mary is the key to supreme gnosis.
 Ratings
 

1. The reader of the Jerusalem Bible cannot realize this. The Greek word gnosis is
translated there by “science”, “knowledge”, “discernment” or other equivalents. The
translation is not false, but it is insufficient to mark the technical meaning in which the
word is taken by Christian authors. Here are the occurrences of gnosis in the New
Testament: Lk 1:17; 11, 52. Rom 2, 20; 11, 33; 15, 14. 1Co 1.5; 8.1 (twice); 8, 7; 8, 10; 8, 11;
12, 8; 13.2; 13, 8; 14, 6. 2 Co 2, 14; 4, 6; 8, 7; 10.5; 11, 6. Ep. 1, 17; 3, 19. Ph 3, 8. Col 2, 3. 1
Tm 6, 20. 1 P 3, 7. 2 P 1, 5; 1, 6; 3, 18. That is twenty-three employments with Paul, four
with Peter, two with Luke.

2. Lk 11, 52.

3. These doctors confuse “gnosis” and “gnosticism”. As Jean Borella reminds us, gnosis is
the interior and saving knowledge of God. The word "Gnosticism" designates a historically
determined systematization of this knowledge such that gnosis is reduced to some of its
constituent elements. The term "Gnosticism" does not appear earlier than the beginning of
the 19th century . “Gnostic” (gnôstikos) Greek adjective meaning, in the ordinary sense, “one
who knows”, the “scholar”, is rarely used to technically characterize a philosophical-
religious movement.

4. There is no written trace, in the official texts of the ecclesiastical magisterium, of the
condemnation of a heresy called "gnosis": "As mentioned by Christ himself, true gnosis is a
communion of love with Him, who brings the Christian life to its ultimate degree, that of
contemplation. On the path of a progressive configuration to the divine nature…” Benedict
XVI, audience of Wednesday, April 18, 2007.

5. This chapter is based on Jean Borella's work, Problè mes de gnose , L'Harmattan, Paris,
2007. Each reader who would like to deepen this chapter will find useful developments and
references there.

6. In the so-called “Septuagint” version. In Isaiah 11:1 we find the origin of the gifts of the
Holy Spirit. Gnosis holds a good place there: “A shoot will come out of the stump of Jesse, a
sucker will grow from its roots. Upon him will rest the Spirit of Yavhe, spirit of wisdom (
Hebrew hokhmah , Greek: sophia) and intelligence (Hebrew, binah , Greek: synesis ), spirit
of counsel (Hebrew: ' etsah , Greek: boulè ) and strength (Hebrew: gevurah , Greek: iskhys ),
spirit of knowledge (Hebrew: da'at , Greek: gnôsis ) and fear (Hebrew: irat , Greek: phobos )
of Yavhé: its inspiration is in the fear of Yavhé. »

7. 1S, 2, 3.
 8. Particularly in the book of Proverbs where gnosis is most often used.

9. The word "gnosis" was absent from French dictionaries before 1840. In all the uses
that could be identified, or nearly so, between the 15th and the beginning of the 19th century,
the word "gnosis" , in French, has a perfectly orthodox meaning.

10. 1 Tim 6, 20. Where Paul unveils the deception of "pseudo-gnosis", inviting Timothy to
flee the contradictions of gnosis in the false name (antitheseis tes pseudonymou gnoseôs) ,
the Jerusalem Bible sees a warning against the “pseudo-science”!

11. Contra Celsum VI, 17, Christian Sources, no. 147, p. 220.

12. Mk 4, 12.

13. Mt 13, 11 to 14.

14. “Do not give to dogs what is sacred, do not cast your pearls before swine, lest they
trample them, and then turn against you to tear you apart. (Mt 7, 6.)

15. Mk 4, 11-12.

16. Mk 4, 21-23.

17. Mk 4, 33-34.

18. Hypotyposes , frgt. 13.

19. Stromata VII, 57, 3.

20. Stromata V, 66, 1-5: “For the gnosis of the divine substance is the eating and drinking
of the divine Logos. »

21. Jn 4, 23.

22. This is what Christ himself affirms in the Gospel according to John: “This is eternal
life; let them know you, the one true God, and the one you sent, Jesus Christ. (17, 3.)

23. “The Gnostic is therefore already divine and holy, carrying God and being carried by
God. (Clement of Alexandria, Stromata VII, 13, 82.)

24. 1 Co 2, 10.

25. Cardinal Jean Daniélou identifies it with the Jewish apocalyptic and the knowledge of
posthumous states. This apocalyptic, linked to a meditation on the first three chapters of
Genesis, brings into play a cosmology that gnosis aims to formulate.

26. It is he whom we find in writings of Pauline inspiration such as the letter to Barnabas
. Its author declares that, if he writes to his interlocutors who already abound in faith, it is
“so that, with the faith that you possess, you may have a perfect gnosis”. This is also why
Paul can say, a few lines apart (1 Col 8, 1-7): "we all have gnosis" and "not all have gnosis",
according to whether it is simple theoretical knowledge which as such is knowledge
ignorant and full of itself, or effective realization of its transcendent and divine nature.

27. A number of passages prove this: Rom 15, 13-14; Ep. 1, 15-18 and 3, 16-19; Col 1, 14;
etc All these texts give pre-eminence to gnosis over faith. But other texts also give first
place to charity. There is no contradiction: no knowledge without love, and no love that is
not, in its essence, knowledge.

28. Lk 2, 19.

 
 MAN, IMAGE OF GOD
 

God says: “ Let us make man in our image, like our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of
the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, all the wild beasts and all the creatures that crawl on
the earth. God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him, male and female
he created them.

GENESIS 1, 26-27
 As his look
 

The Lord made man not only in his image but also in his likeness:

“Let us make man in our image, like our likeness 1 …”

The phrase " in our image, like our likeness lacks development if we stick to the Old
Testament alone. In the books of the Old Testament, few things allow us to base a religious
anthropology on the notion of the image of God. Let us at least quote " Scarcely did you
make it less than a god 2 ".

Now, through the Incarnation, which is the fundamental fact of Christianity, "image" and
"theology" are linked. The New Testament gives us the key to this Old Testament which
Paul considered as " the shadow of good things to come, not the very substance of realities 3 ".
Christ is

“the Image of the invisible God 4 ”, it is “the Image of God 5 ”.

Later, in the same letter to the Colossians , the apostle speaks of the renovation of man in
the image of the creator God. Christ is the " effigy of his substance 6 as is the exact imprint
left by a seal. What is manifested by the image is not the person of the Father, but his
nature, identical in the Son. In this image, man can configure himself, renovate himself 7 .

The image of God is not something that would be in man. The whole man is in the image
of God. For Irenaeus, the image of God in man includes both the soul and the human body,
which is also formed in the image of God 8 . The Office of the Dead of the Orthodox Church
confirms the human body as the image of God: " I weep and groan when I see lying in the
grave our beauty created in the image of God... "

And in his likeness

 

If we compare ourselves to man created "in the image and likeness " of God, we must see
that something has been lost. Also, the Fathers distinguished the two notions, image and
resemblance. With the fall, we lost the resemblance, but the image of God remains whole,
immanent. Let's compare the situation to a colored engraving. Suddenly she lost color and
light. Only the line remains, a small colorless photograph. It always represents the same
thing. The image remains, but the resemblance has faded. We must restore it.

The image is unalterable, the resemblance must be

restored
 

God being elusive by our senses, his image is too. It cannot undergo any alteration. Its
existence is independent of our will, which is why it remains in every man. All the efforts of
man will not succeed in depriving God of his own image! It expresses itself, spreads like the
projection of a prism located at the center of human existence. But it is usually silenced and
rendered ineffective.

If the image is present, already realized, the resemblance is potential or virtual. The
resemblance is to be found because

“every man is in the image of God, but possibly also in his likeness 9 ”.

Man is created with the power and the duty to become like God, to become God 10 . Man
created “in the image” is the person capable of manifesting God insofar as his nature lets
himself be penetrated by the uncreated divine energies. Thus the image can become similar
or dissimilar up to the last limits. At best, it attains union with God when the deified man
shows in himself, by grace, what God is by his nature. At worst, it falls into the extreme
decay that Plotinus called “the place of dissimilarity” by situating it in the dark abyss of
Hades.

According to Grégoire Palamas, man is the reflection of uncreated divine energies.

Provided that his created image is in communion with the uncreated nature of God. In
other words, man is the image and likeness of God when he lives in free and close synergy
with God. Basil the Great comments on the biblical word thus:

“Let us create man in our image and likeness.” We possess one (ie the image) by Creation,
we acquire the other (ie the likeness) by will. In the first structure, it is given to us to be
born in the image of God, by the will is formed in us the being in the likeness of God. What
comes from the will, our nature possesses it in power, but it is by action that we obtain it…
By giving us the power to resemble God, he has allowed us to be the artisans of the
resemblance to God. God… So then… he left it to me to become in the likeness of God 11 …”
  

This is realized when the image of God which is man cooperates freely with his model.

The reality of man is found in the archetype

 

The consequences are considerable. Fundamentally, the reality of man is not found in
himself, if by that we mean an autonomous being. Because

“I bear the image of God: if He wants to contemplate Himself He can only do so in me, in
whom He resembles 12 ”.

The deep reality of man is not found in his natural and physical peculiarities, as
materialist theories maintain. It does not reside in the soul or in the upper part of it, as
many ancient philosophers believed. It is not entirely contained in the human ego, as
asserted by contemporary psychological systems. This truth is found in the archetype, in
the image of God whose likeness is the altered reflection. Since man is an image, his true
being is not determined by the matter of which the image is made. No more than the
identity of a sculpted bust resides in the block of marble.

From spiritual to biological

 

Before the fall 13 , man wore a garment woven by God:

“His body was not subject . . . to corruption; resembling a statue which one withdraws
from the furnace and which shines with the liveliest brilliance, he experienced none of
those infirmities which we observe there today . »

This psychosomatic garment was woven with light and the glory of God. On this garment
shone the resemblance to the divine. The first created beings
 "were clothed with the glory from on high [...] or rather the glory from on high enveloped
them in a whole garment " .

What is "a woven garment of light and glory"? Light furnishes us with the most exact
representation of the relationship between man and God. The sun giving everything to all is
the very image of the Father who sends his rays, his heat, his energy, to every creature.

To see God is to see the uncreated, primordial Light. On earth, we can know this Light.
She is sometimes seen around or above the saints. Although soft, this Light is of an
unbearable whiteness that can lead to loss of consciousness. It is absolute white, source
white 17 . However, we catch a glimpse of it under closed eyelids, on emerging from an
ecstasy during which we found ourselves, experimentally, in God.

Then the man came into reflective consciousness. This access to autonomy resulted in the
loss of the state of innocence. The event is described as a fall 18 whose mark we still bear.
Proceeding from the spiritual, man passes to the biological. So

"Yahweh God made coats of skins for the man and his wife and clothed them . "

These tunics of skin are not an envelope in which the soul would have been imprisoned,
as one imprisons a human being in a straitjacket or a diving suit. It is not the body, but its
present state, which results from the fall. These tunics of skin are not an image of the
physical body in which the soul would be locked up and from which it would free itself at
death. They should rather be conceived as a being (body and soul) of densified, frozen,
hardened light.

What constitutes man “in the image” is the body with the soul; not the soul without the
body, and no longer the body without the soul, but the compound without separation of a
soul and a body. The “in the image” extends to the psychosomatic totality of the human
being. The coats of skin express the mortality that man has put on after the fall as a second
nature, the new situation in which he finds himself, that is to say a life in death. This
mortality embraces the whole psychosomatic organism of man and is not limited to the
body. The psychic functions also have become bodily. They form with the body, “the veil of
the heart [...], the carnal garment of the old man 20 ”. It is the man whom the apostle Paul
calls "carnal" or "psychic" as opposed to the "spiritual" man. These tunics of skin are a
consequence; they are not a sanction inflicted on man by a megalomaniac god. Certainly,
they represent an obscuration due to "the image", a violence done to the clothing of light.
But they are also a remedy. These tunics of skin offer the possibility of surviving for some
time even within death until recovering, then going beyond the initial habit.
 Ratings
 

1. Gen 1, 26-27. Researchers refuse to distinguish between the terms "image" and
"likeness". They are supported by the initial Hebrew text, the two words tselem and
demouth being essentially synonymous. But this extract from the Creation account is
developed in the Book of Wisdom , written in Greek around the middle of the 1st century BC.
We find there a paraphrase of “ Let us make man in our image ” which attributes
incorruptibility to the vocation of man: “ Yes, God created man for incorruptibility. (Wis
2:23). This incorruptibility is a conformity to the nature of God: “ He made it an image of his
own nature. (Wis 2:23) . Translation of the Jerusalem Bible. “He did it in the image of his own
eternity. (Translation of the same verse by André Chouraqui.)

2. Ps 8, 6 recalled in Heb 2, 6.

3. Heb 10, 1.

4. Col 1, 15.

5. 2 Co 4, 4.

6. Heb 1, 3.

7. Col 3, 10; Rom 8.29; 1 Cor 15, 49.

8. Irenaeus, Against Heresies V, 6, I.

9. Grégoire Palamas, Second Letter to Barlaam 48, Grégoire Palamas, Works , volume I, p.
287 (in Greek).

10. Already in the second century, Clement of Alexandria developed the theme of the Creation
of man in the image of God, man having to freely acquire resemblance by perfecting himself
through the practice of the virtues, and achieving assimilation with God. For Basil the Great
(4th century ), man is a created being who has received the command to become God (cf.
Gregory the Theologian, PG 36, 560).

11. Quoted by Jevtic, Athanase, Theology ascetic , Institute of Orthodox Theology Saint-
Serge, Paris, 1986.

12. Angelus Silesius, The Cherubic Pilgrim (I, 105).

13. “Before” means “in principle” and not “at the origin of time”. Time and space
belonging to Creation, these concepts have no meaning below this Creation.
 14. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statues , XI, 2.

15. What is the “glory” of God? Greek translators render as doxa the Hebrew word kabod
. The verb corresponding to kabod directs the thought towards the weight of a thing.
Applied to God, the word makes one think rather of his supernatural resplendence,
superior to anything that creatures can suggest. It is about his very being. The song of the
divine liturgy reports the vision of Isaiah : Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh Sabaot, his glory fills
the whole earth. » (Is 6, 3.) This Semitic background colors, in the Greek Bible, the sense of
the word doxa which originally denoted « fame ». He thus comes to evoke the incomparable
radiance of the holiness of God, a glory with which the earth is full (Rev 4:8).

16. John Chrysostom, On Genesis .

17. Each created object does not by itself have a color. It receives the light of the sun
which sends it all the visible radiations. And it is the radiation it sends back that gives it its
color, in our eyes. Each object sends back what it has received, in accordance with its
capacity to receive. The white object returns everything and that is why snow is a symbol
of purity. He keeps nothing for himself. The black object, conversely, is the very type of the
miser who has received everything and returns nothing. The rainbow, which unfolds all the
colors, is therefore the visible symbol of the covenant between God and Creation. The
rainbow associates light (fire) and humidity (water).

18. The literary genre of the text is what in Hebrew is called a mâschâl , that is to say a
comparison, an analogy, a fable which is based on concrete data to communicate a teaching
of wisdom. .

19. Gen 3, 21.

20. Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Song of Songs .

 THE DEIFICATION OF MAN
 

By them the precious, the greatest promises have been given to us, so that you may thus
become partakers of the divine nature, being delivered from the corruption that is in the
world, in lust.

2 PETER 1, 4
 Become what we are
 

Man is created in the image of God. To be “in the image” represents both a gift and a goal.
This possibility of deification concerns the human being in all his components, from the
somatic and psychic strata to the very heart of his being.

The Word is the maker of gods

 

The theme of the deification of man was present in several philosophical and religious
currents of Antiquity, in particular Orphism, Platonism, Stoicism and Hermeticism. Based
on the Scriptures 1 , Christianity made this clear. To the question: "Why did God become
man?" all the Fathers respond in the same way, from Irenaeus or Clement of Alexandria to
Athanasius or Dionysius the Areopagite. Augustine summarizes their doctrine in the
formula:

“God became man so that man might become God 2 . »

Two centuries earlier, Irenaeus said:

“Such is the reason why the Word became man, and the Son of God, Son of man; it is so
that man, by mixing with the Word and thus receiving adoptive filiation, becomes the Son
of God 3 . »

The Fathers and theologians of the Church of the East 4 repeated it from century to
century. Several theologians of the Western Church 5 did the same 6 . All recalled the essence
of Christianity: a descent of God to the ultimate limits of our present state, to death. But a
descent from God which opens to men a path of ascent, the union of created beings with the
Divinity. This is stated in the ancient prayer of the Roman mass which the priest recites at
the offertory by pouring a little water into the wine of the chalice:
 “God, who established human nature in an admirable nobility, and who restored it in an
even more admirable manner: grant us, by the sacramental mystery of this water and this
wine, to have part in the divinity of Him who deigned to take part in our humanity. »

The Body of Glory

 

If we consider that nature is self-sufficient, that it is a set of blind processes, it means

nothing and death has the last word. Man himself, as a natural being, has neither meaning
nor depth. An infinitesimal parcel of nature, he is conditioned by it, his consciousness is left
to contingency. If we don't put on the sparkling habit of the angels met at Easter dawn by
the Holy Women 7 , our body is only " dough kneaded with blood and tears 8 " and " the great
pallor of the flesh 9 " is our fate. Until we are born again, we are like extinguished candles.

The body of glory, of which the white dawn is the symbol, is established when the
baptismal germ bears fruit. The terrestrial body is transformed into a body of glory 10 , into
an incorruptible “ spiritual body 11 ”, which makes us “ put on the image of the celestial Adam 12 ”. If man
collaborates in his own transformation, deification is the key. During the process, man is
transfigured, deified starting from the heart, at the same time center of the person and the
body, effective and symbolic place of the divine presence.

Even deified, the bodies will not identify themselves with the divine nature. They will
keep their identity. Air does not cease to be air because sunlight illuminates it. The
reddened iron remains iron, although it seems transformed into fire. The deification of
man, while transforming him, lets his nature subsist with his person:

“Pierre remains Pierre, Paul remains Paul, and Philippe remains Philippe. Each remains
in his nature and in his person, filled with the Spirit .

Using a frequently repeated simile, Macarius explains how man is deified by

participation:

"Just as iron placed in the midst of fire does not cease to be iron, but, when inflamed by
its very violent contact with fire, it receives into itself all the nature of fire and by the color
and the action turned into fire 14 …”

 
 Iron participates in the energy of fire. However, although heated, it does not become fire.
This image of iron and fire, Gregory of Nyssa takes it up with a more carnal connotation:

“As iron, placed in intimate contact with fire, immediately takes on the color of the latter,
so the nature of the flesh, after having received within it the divine Logos, incorruptible and
vivifying, remained no longer in the flesh. same condition, but became free from corruption . »

In the twelfth century, in the Latin world, Guillaume de Saint-Thierry evokes this outline
of the body of glory completed in the future life. He alludes to the "angelic language" which
serves as a communication to the sages whose body of glory is already accomplished on the
earthly plane. Naming the seven degrees of the soul in the contemplation of the Truth, he
specifies that the seventh is not a degree, but a dwelling 16 . There the resurrection body is
realized.

The feel of the bones

 

Soul and body must be consumed by divine fire. Deification is linked to the reception of
divine light. Thomas Aquinas explains:

“God deifies as fire signifies, by communicating the likeness of his nature. »

The "living flame" and " the streams of living water [that] will spring from his belly 17 must
be taken in their literal and corporeal sense as well as in their spiritual sense . These are
the down payment of the body of Light. We must be transformed physically and psychically
in order to access these new heavens and this new earth promised by Peter, Paul and John.
We must be transformed, body and soul, since the living waters penetrate by watering them,
the soul and the body which are the upper and lower parts » , specifies John of the Cross 18 .

The Fathers evoke an illumination which they perceive even in the bones. The feeling of
God is accompanied by the "feeling of the bones", that is, the feeling of God in the bones.
John of the Cross explains it:

"And sometimes the anointing of the Holy Spirit flows from this good from the soul to the
body and all the sensitive part enjoys it, as also all the members, the bones and the marrow
- and this, not in a small way, as sometimes happens. ordinarily, but with a feeling of great
delight and great glory, which is felt to the last knuckles of the feet and hands... And the
body feels such great glory in the glory of the soul, which it exalts God in his own way.
Feeling it in his bones, as David said: “All my bones will say: My God, who is like you ? And
because all that can be said is too little, this is why it suffices to say, as much of what
happens in the body as of what happens in the spirit, that it feels eternal life . . »

It is because they are aware of the simultaneous transfiguration of body and soul that
Christians respect the relics of saints. The grace of God – the supernatural gift that God
gives us – is active in the bodies of the saints during their lifetime. It continues in their
relics which He makes instruments of healing. The vulgar stone is transformed into a
precious stone. The crystal penetrated by the light becomes light, the iron brought to the
fire becomes fire. For Basil of Caesarea,

"divine power appeared through the human body, like a light through transparent,
shining membranes, for those who have a purified heart".

This process of deification gives man a new body, the body of Light promised to the elect
for eternity 21 . They can put it on while they have not left this earth. The terrestrial body is
transformed into a body of glory 22 , into an incorruptible spiritual body 23 . It replaces the natural
body, this tunic of skin with which man was clothed at the dawn of time.

"Then the righteous shall shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father . " »

Her face beamed

 

Let us beware of a first error, frequent in occultist circles. The glorious body of the risen
Christ or of the deified man is not an intermediary between the so-called "gross" body and
the soul. It's not a whitish phantom, a spider's web in icy contact, as in doublings. It is not a
pile of subtle bodies (aura, etheric body, etc.) which would double the body of flesh without
being confused with it. Our glorious, spiritual body is a body that can be touched:

“Feel me and realize that a spirit has neither flesh nor bones, as you see I have 25 . »

Let us beware of a second error, symmetrical to the previous one and frequent in
Christian circles. The mystical life is not an exclusively moral transformation. During our
ascension, the soul is transfigured and transformed. But since soul and body are one in
biblical anthropology, our body is jointly deified with our soul. The body is transformed
right here below. The whole man is renewed, he dies and rises again. Grégoire Palamas
confirms:

“If in future times the body is called upon to share with the soul unspeakable bliss, it is
certain that it must as much as possible, from now on, have its share of it. »

In this life some saints experienced the first fruits of this visible glorification of the body.
In 1933, Cardinal Verdier opened the tomb of Catherine Labouré, who died on December
31, 1876. The body of this woman – still visible in Paris in the chapel on Rue du Bac – was
intact and her limbs supple. In the notebooks of the Brothers Karamazov , Dostoyevsky
writes:

“Your flesh will be transfigured (the light of Tabor). The light of Tabor distinguishes man
from the matter from which he makes his food. »

Such sayings have their roots in the Old Testament:

“When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, the two tablets of the Testimony were in
Moses' hand when he came down from the mountain, and Moses did not know that the skin
of his face was glowing because he had spoken with him. Aaron and all the Israelites saw
Moses, and behold the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to approach him… When
Moses had finished speaking to them, he put a veil over his face. When Moses entered
before Yahweh to speak with him, he removed the veil until he came out… And the
Israelites saw Moses' face radiate. Then Moses put the veil back on his face, until he entered
to speak with him .

What was the exception in the Old Testament became almost the rule in the New.

The accounts of ascetics touching the light are innumerable. Among the contemporary
examples, let us recall Nicolas Motovilov recounting his interview with Séraphin de Sarov.
The author did not understand what was meant by the formula of Séraphin, his spiritual
father, for whom the goal of Christian life is " acquiring the Holy Spirit » . Then the old monk
revealed himself to him transfigured and made him enter into the same plenitude:

"Imagine in the middle of the sun, in the full brilliance of its noonday rays, the face of the
man who speaks to you," writes Motovilov. You see the movement of his lips, the changing
expression of his eyes, you hear the sound of his voice, you feel the pressure of his hands on
your shoulders, but, at the same time, you see neither his hands nor his body, nor yours,
nothing but a sparkling light that spreads all around, at a distance of several meters,
illuminating the snow that covers the meadow and falls on the starets 27 and on myself 28 …”
  

The light here is not an impersonal ocean in which we should merge. Nothing is
abolished from the movement and the word of the mouth, from the expression of the eyes.
But the face, like that of Christ on Mount Tabor, is in the middle of the sun. It radiates this
other sun.
 Ratings
 

1. “This doctrine has a solid New Testament scriptural background [relating to New
Testament texts] which appears in the continuity of Old Testament teaching [relating to Old
Testament texts]. This continuity is most clearly manifested in Jn 10:34, where the formula
of Psalm 81:6 is taken up by Christ : I said : you are gods. The same psalm in its first verse
proclaimed : God stood in the assembly of the gods, in the midst of them he judges the gods. To
these formulas echoes the affirmation of the apostle Paul, repeated twice: We are of his race
[...], we are of the race of God. » (Acts 17, 28-29.) Another essential affirmation is that of the
apostle Peter: by the glory and the active force of God « the goods of the highest price which
had been promised to us have been granted to us, so that you may thus become in communion
with the divine nature… (2 Pet 1, 4.). Other formulas bear witness to an assimilation to
Christ : All of you who have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. (Gal 3, 27.) […] I live,
but it is no longer me, it is Christ who lives in me. » (Gal 2, 20.) To the theme of divinization
must be linked those of the Creation of man in the image and likeness of God (cf. Gen 1, 26-
27; Wis 2, 23. ), of filial adoption (Dt 14, 1; Ps 81, 6; 88, 27-28; Wis 2, 18; 5, 5; Mt 6, 9; Rom
8, 14-17; Ga 3, 26; 4, 4-7.), of the imitation of God until he becomes perfect as He is (cf. Mt 5,
48.), of the promise of a future condition in which the faithful will share in the
incorruptibility and to divine immortality (cf. Wis 2, 23; 5, 15-16; 6, 18; 1 Cor 15, 53.),
where he will find perfection in the vision of God who will assimilate him to Himself (1 Jn 3,
2), where he will be glorified in His light (cf. Mt 13, 43.) (Jean-Claude Larchet, The
divinization of man according to Saint Maxime the Confessor. )

2. " Factus is Deus homo ut homo fiery and Deus. ( Sermo 128 , PL, t. 39, 1997; it is a
Christmas sermon.) We find these words for the first time in Irenaeus, Against Heresies , V,
praef. (PG, t. 7, col. 1120).

3. Against Heresies , III, 19, 1.

4. The Roman Empire was once divided into two parts: the Western Empire and the
Eastern Empire, whose capitals were respectively Rome and Constantinople (later
Byzantium). The Church of the Latin-speaking countries is called the "Church of the West",
and the Church of the Greek-speaking countries the "Church of the East". To the latter
should be added that of the Aramaic-speaking countries, located on territories that once
made up Mesopotamia (Iraq, Syria, etc.).

5. Let us mention Louis Laneau (1637-1696), bishop of Metellopolis and apostolic vicar
in the kingdom of Siam. In a decisive experience, he discovered that the words of John in his
first letter on our quality as "sons of God" have a deeper meaning than anything he had
understood until then. He explores its various aspects in his De deificatione justorum (On
the deification of the just), completed in 1693 but published in 1887.
 6. “...that the Catholic who would be surprised not to find mention of deification in the
index of his catechism or of his theological manual look therefore at “justification”, at
“beatific vision”, at “inhabitation ” and finally to “transforming union”, unless it is found in
“divinisation”, he will find there the substance of what he seeks, if he seeks it in truth. (Jean
Borella, preface to On the Deification of the Just , Louis Laneau, Ad Solem, Geneva, 1993).

7. Lk 24, 1-8.

8. Gabriela Mistral, Ecstasy .

9. Gabriela Mistral, Drops of gall .

10. Phil 3, 21.

11. 1 Cor 15, 44.

12. 1 Cor 15, 49.

13. Macaire, Hom . (Coll. III, 3, 3, SC 275, p. 92.)

14. Adv. Eunom. , III, 2, SC 305, p. 152-154.

15. Hom. parsch. , XVII, PG 77, 785D-788A.

16. Of natura corporis and animae . Ed. M.-M. Davy, Paris, 1953.

17. Jn 7, 38.

18. Vive Flamme , III str., verse 3, p. 1031.

19. Ps 34, 10.

20. Long Live Flame II, 5.

21. Mt 13, 45.

22. Phil 3, 21.

23. 1 Cor 15, 44.

24. Mt 13, 43.

25. Lk 24, 39-40.

26. Ex 34, 29-35.

27. Starets; the word means "old man" in the Russian language.
 28. Trans. In Irina Goraïroff, Séraphin de Sarov , col. Oriental spirituality, n° 11,
Bellefontaine, p. 209.
 THE TRANSFIGURATION OF THE WORLD
 

We know indeed, all Creation to this day groans in labor.

ROMANS 8, 22
 what death destroys
 

What death destroys is the captivity of life in a world where everything is transformation,
birth and death. By its dissolution, the human body penetrates to the depths of the earth.
Man becomes again earth and water, fire and air.

to the earth as it was . »

This dust is no longer the undifferentiated matter of origins. It was matrixed, structured.
She has acquired the "form" of man. The material Creation had introduced its corruption
into man; it in turn covers, in an equally organic way, the human body. Hence the function
of relics, bodily matter worked on by prayer.

I saw a new heaven and a new earth

 

Up to a certain point, this world is illusion. There is a network of hypnoses and idolatries,
the sleep in which Adam is immersed. The man who succumbs to naïve realism claims to
believe only in what he sees. Or rather, he imagines it. If he took his speech seriously, he
would still believe that the earth is flat and the moon is smaller than a coin.

This world is not just a dream. It has a certain degree of reality. But it derives its
consistency from its participation in its model. The shadow you cast on the ground does
exist. It has a degree of reality; she takes it from her model. This shadow wouldn't exist if
you weren't there. Like the shadow, the empire world that derives its existence from the
spiritual world.

The new heaven and the new earth 2 are already there, in all their perfection. If
Christianity emphasizes the reality of the created universe, it also insists on its
transparency to the spiritual model in which it participates:

"Then I saw a new heaven, a new earth - for the first heaven and the first earth have
disappeared 3 ..."
  

This perfection appears to the being who puts on the “new man”.

Creation groans in labor

 

As an image of God, man transcends the universe, contains it and qualifies it. It
constitutes the junction between the divine and the earthly. From him, the celestial fire can
spread throughout all of Creation.

Christ took flesh. He made possible the metamorphosis of Creation. With the resurrection
of Christ, humanity and, through it, Creation, are susceptible to transfiguration. Deified
humanity is not torn from the rest of Creation; Creation must be glorified with it,

“for the awaiting Creation longs for the revelation of the sons of God…it is with the hope
that it too will be freed from the bondage of corruption to enter into the freedom of the
glory of the children of God; we know in fact that all of Creation to this day groans in labor .

Around the saint, nature is transformed. He perceives each being and each thing
differently. Children, the wildest beasts, even plants commune with him. Francis of Assisi
fraternized with animals. A hermit from Patmos at the beginning of the 20th century gave
vipers small cups of milk to drink and feared nothing from them. These stories are countless.

“Near is the paradisiacal state, and the wild beasts smell in the wise or the saint the
perfume which was that of Adam before the fall; they go to him in peace . »
 Ratings
 

1. Qo 12, 7.

2. Rev 21, 1.

3. Rev 21, 1.

4. Rom 8, 19-22.

5. Isaac the Syrian, Ascetic Treatises , 20th treatise , ed. Spanos, Athens, 1895, tr. Fr. Spiritual
Works , Paris, 1981, p. 78.
 THE STAGES OF REVELATION
 

Where is the king of the Jews who has just been born? We saw, in fact, his star at its rising
and came to pay homage to him.

MATTHEW 2, 2
 The divine pedagogy
 

To man, God has entrusted several landmarks in his march towards deification. Let us
distinguish three stages of Revelation.

The first revelation

 

Several philosophers of Antiquity, the old Mystery religions , the builders of cathedrals,
the alchemists of the Renaissance, Catholic 1 and Orthodox theologies have insisted on this
point: the universe which surrounds us is a revelation. God is known by Creation, his first
manifestation. God has deployed the world of bodies around us so that we can find there
something to return to him. It is the doctrine of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, it is
the doctrine of the Scriptures, this library of the Hebrew people which we call the Bible .
This is the doctrine of the apostle Paul. God is known by his works, says John the
Evangelist...

The world is a mirror in which God allows himself to be contemplated. The Invisible -
manifests its being and its power in the visible universe:

firmament announces it .”

[…] What is invisible to him since the Creation of the world can be seen by intelligence
through his works 3 .

The universe is an image of God because every work denotes its author. In a painting, the
expert recognizes the painter because the painting expresses something of its creator. The
world we perceive also reveals its Creator:

“Because the greatness and beauty of creatures make us, by analogy, contemplate their
author 4 .”

Everything is a sign where God makes himself known to us. Such is the charter of
medieval symbolism, in theology, in philosophy, and even in the decorative art of
cathedrals. The symbolism of Lapidaries and Bestiaries, without forgetting that which
adorned the porches of our cathedrals or shone in their stained glass windows, are so many
testimonies of confidence in the translucency of a universe where the least of beings is an
indication of the presence of God. . Creatures being imitations of God, their properties and
the relations of these properties between them help us to know those of God.

According to Scotus Erigena, all created beings are lights. Everything, even the most
humble, is basically only a nightlight in which shines, however faintly, the divine light.
Made of this multitude of small lamps, Creation is an illumination intended to show God.
The universe would cease to be if God ceased to radiate.

In a thesis on the work of Karl von Eckhartshausen, Antoine Faivre comments on this
natural revelation by having recourse to the characters born under the pen of the German
theosophist:

“It is by looking at the leaves of a flower that Aglais discovers the existence of God; the
scents of spring, the waves that the wind makes on the fields of wheat, persuade him of His
goodness. Nature proves that God exists : such is the title of one of his stories, in which he
complacently describes the charms of spring and the caresses of a tender wife. Besides,
how can we understand God without nature?… Eloas, “priest of nature”, teaches his disciple
Sophron that everything around us is the manifestation of God, the living letter of His
splendour, through which He reveals himself … Knowing nature, teaches Sophron, allows
one to rise in stages to the knowledge of supernature (sic) thanks to the divine imprints,
because there is nothing invisible in the spirit of Light which does not have a visible and
graspable shadow here below .

The Creator revealed his purpose in his Creation and invited true scholars to know him
by his works, especially in his most sublime parts. Thus, astronomy and astrology, which
formed only one science when these texts were written, arouse in us the praise of the
Creator 6 .They raise our spirit towards the light from above.

The Chaldean science of Abraham 7 and the Egyptian science of Moses 8 testify to this. As
for the adoration of the Magi… Origen compares the stars to written characters and the sky
to the Bible. By studying the Book of the World, we can access its author. The prognosis by
the stars is a gift that men have received to compensate for the loss of prophetic wisdom
resulting from their expulsion from Paradise 9 . As good astrologers, the Magi 10 arrive at the
nativity scene solely by observing and, above all, by correctly interpreting the star 11 . They
are the first to receive the announcement of the Nativity of Christ. They are the worthy
representatives of this first revelation 12 .

The second revelation

  

This first revelation is an introduction, a preparation for two other revelations. God
chose a chosen people among whom he raised up prophets and teachers, and performed
miraculous events. He gave him a written Law, the Torah, which came to the aid of the
teachings of Creation.

The Third Revelation

 

Then came the third revelation, in which God self-communicates in person. Henceforth, it
is no longer a question of man seeking God, but of God seeking man. This self-
communication is the common point of three mysteries; The Trinity (God reveals himself to
us as he is), the Incarnation (the Word became man) and grace (this divinizing fire which
we will discuss later). The Incarnation teaches us that

"God became man in order to show to what height he would carry us...so that, having
become the son of man and sharing their mortality, he would carry men to their perfection
as sons of God and make them participate in divine immortality 13 …

[…] The Word of God became flesh, and the flesh became the Word, without either of the
two abandoning their intimate nature .” 14

The flesh of Christ is man's point of contact with God. In Christ, heaven and earth are
welded together. Christ assumed every particle of our human body, every particle of this
human nature, recapitulation of Creation.

In the person of Christ, the human person existed integrally , deified by his union with
the Word of God. Human nature thus assumed has received the plenitude of divine energy.
Since then, the possibility of his deification has been assured for all human beings. The
origin of men from Adam involved a link with their ancient roots and their mortality. Their
grafting on a new plant allows their regeneration. Christ did not come to help us endure the
nightmare of existence; he came to get us out of it:

“From now on, we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been manifested.
We know that in this manifestation we will be like him, because we will see him as he is .
 Ratings
 

1. This doctrine, the possibility of knowing God from Creation, is constant among the
Greek Fathers and the Latin Fathers, among the great doctors of the Middle Ages. It was
solemnly defined by the Catholic Church at the First Vatican Council in 1870: "The same
holy mother the Church holds and teaches that God, who is the beginning and the end of all
beings, can be known from a certain way in the natural light of human reason from created
realities. cannon : If anyone were to say that the one and true God, the Creator and our
Lord, cannot be known with certainty in the natural light of human reason, let him be
anathema. »

2. Ps 19, 2.

3. Rom 1, 20.

4. Wis 13, 5.

5. Antoine Faivre, Eckartshausen and Christian Theosophy , Paris, 1969, pp. 263-264.

6. The same goes for alchemy.

7. Abraham appears as an astrologer in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities I. 158-161, and

Eupolemus, quoted with Josephus by Eusebius, The Evangelical Preparation , IX. 16, 17, 18,
ed. Transl. E. des Places, SC 369, Paris, 1991, p. 232-241; see also Clement of Alexandria,
The Stromata , V 8, ed. A. le Boulluec, trans. P. Voulet, SC 278, Paris, 1981, p. 36-39, pers. A.
le Boulluec, p. 58-59.

8. Cf. Ac 7, 22. Philo and Clement specify that this paideia (education) had included
astrology: Philo of Alexandria, De vita Mosis , I-II, ed. Transl. R. Arnaldez – C. Mondésert – J.
Pouilloux – P. Savinel, Paris, 1967, p. 155.

9. Nerses Snorhali, who lived from 1102 to 1173 and ruled the Armenian Church as
Catholicos from 1166, wrote a poem around 1160 with the title The Sky and its Splendors . It
amply develops (131 verses) the theme of the glorification and revelation of the Creator by
his celestial works. In a long section on the zodiac, he argues the science of astrology. In the
Latin world, Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly (1350-1420), legate of Pope Martin V and Chancellor of
the Sorbonne, considered astrology to be a "natural theology". By astrological reasoning,
Pierre d'Ailly thought that the world would be turned upside down in 1789. Then would
come the Antichrist, that is to say a society where everything that was sacred would be
fought and destroyed. Nearly half a millennium in advance, he announced: "There will be a
complement of ten revolutions of Saturn in the Christian year 1789... Then there will be
great and spectacular changes of the world... as far as concerns laws and religions. (From
Concordia astronomiae. )

10. Among the Chaldeans, the Magi were members of the priestly caste. Mundane
astrology – which concerns the destiny of peoples and kingdoms – entered into their
function. Ancient texts from the Near East tell us that there were twelve of them. In the
later Christian tradition, their number was reduced to three because of the three gifts
mentioned in verse 11. They were considered kings under the influence of the Psalms (72,
10) and the book of Isaiah (49, 7). Use the New World Translation for clear language: "After
Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of King Herod, behold, astrologers [from
Jerusalem and said, “Where is he who was born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when
[we were] in the east, and we have come to pay homage to him.” »

11. Mt 2, 2. The Magi do not blindly follow a star. They observed a celestial configuration,
which they interpreted as the birth of the king of the Jews, in Palestine. So they go, not to
the crib, but to the capital, Jerusalem, to find out from Herod, the king at the time.

12. When late theology devalued this first revelation, the articles of faith were relegated
to the irrational. No logical approach seemed possible anymore. From the opposition
between mysteries and rational data, Montaigne deduced the doctrine of the “double truth”
according to which religious truth retains all its validity without suffering from being found
false by philosophical analysis. Descartes' god is no longer symbolized by the things he
created; it does not express itself in the world. There is no analogy between God and the
world, no images or vestiges of the divine in the world, with the sole exception of our soul,
which is a pure spirit, a substance whose whole essence does not consists only of thought.
This doctrine ratifying the divorce of faith and reason, the adversaries of the first will easily
denounce these truths as so many absurd artifices. While in this book that is the world, God
had given a representation of metaphysical truths readable by all.

13. Gregory Palamas, Homily 16 (PG 151, 201 D-204 B).

14. Synodal volume 1, 9 (PG 151, 683 B).

15. 1 Jn 3, 2.
 HOW TO DO ?
 

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

MATTHEW 5, 8
 How to undertake our divinization?
 

Let's reread the parable of the tares and the good seed 1 : the tares grow without our
needing to cultivate them. On the other hand, the good seed requires considerable work to
bear fruit. You have to plow the land, feed it with fertilizer, sow it carefully, harrow it, etc. If
the harvest is not harvested, after a few years no ear of wheat can be found. The tares, a
natural plant, smother the wheat and the rye, the fruits of human culture. The divine
energies act in us if we make efforts to receive them.

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened to
you. For whoever asks receives; who seeks finds ; and to whomever knocks it will be
opened 2 . »

Human efforts alone cannot produce anything stable or permanent. The result is
obtained by the conjunction of human efforts and divine initiative. This is a commentary on
the text of the Apoca lypse :

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I
will come in to him for supper, I near him and he near me 3 . »

God exerts constant pressure on us. But it's up to us to hear the voice and open the door.

Certain tools facilitate the process of regeneration, the last term of the scenario which
begins with Creation, is prolonged by the fall and its consequences, to end in deification. In
this process of deification, let us successively explore the part that belongs to man and that
which comes from divine energies.

man side
 

These are the psychic and physical techniques that purify and prepare the raw material
that we are, so that it can be worked on. They promote an attitude of body and soul that
makes man receptive to divinizing energies. Like the prophet Ezekiel 4 who was raised to
heaven by the fringe of his hair, they promote docility to the divinizing action of the Spirit.
The Gospel of the Hebrews, composed before the end of the second century , illustrates this:

“Just now my Mother, the Holy Spirit, took me by one of my hairs and transported me to
the great mountain, Tabor 5 . »

These techniques aim to pacify the passions, instincts suffered. Among them are fasting,
gestures (physical and mental postures, participation in the liturgy, singing), desire, silence,
breathing and active observation that lead to true prayer. Mention should also be made of
possible processes which act directly on the blood and other bodily substances.

God side
 

Doors open the way to divinizing energies. Three of them hold the place of honor and
cannot be used without each other. These are the sacraments and first and foremost the
Eucharist, the study of the Scriptures and prayer.

Nicolas Cabasilas offers a summary. The end of man is to be reborn and resuscitate: such
has been the lesson of the Fathers since the apostolic age . He discerns a glimpse of it in the
Ancient Mysteries. The energies contained in the glorified body of Christ are communicated
to his initiates and ensure their deification. This communication takes place, among other
means, through the sacraments. They are the points of space and time where divine life
meets human life and transfigures it, celebrations and procedures by which deification is
realized. Baptism and confirmation restore the resemblance in the act, which frees the
image whose radiance becomes perceptible. The eucha ristie nourishes this divinization.
 Ratings
 

1. Mt 13, 24-30.

2. Mt 7, 7-8.

3. 3, 20.

4. Eze 8, 3.

5. Allusion to Mount Tabor, where tradition places the episode of the Transfiguration (Mt
17, 1-9; Mk 9, 2-10, Lk 9, 28-36).
 KNOW YOURSELF
 

Neither do they put new wine into old skins; otherwise the skins burst, the wine spills and
the skins are lost. But new wine is put into new skins, and both are preserved.

MATTHEW 9, 17
 Prepare to receive
 

We have risen to the highest degree of refined animal-man. To effectively receive the
regenerating fire, man must keep himself as a vessel capable of receiving it. A slowly heated
vase will receive very hot water without bursting.

Bringing order out of chaos

 

To move forward, we need to know what we are working on. An image allows us to
represent the state of man: it is the Platonic coupling 1 :

• The physical body is represented by a carriage.

• Horses represent sensations, emotions and passions.

• The charioteer is all of the intellectual faculties, including reason.

• The person sitting in the carriage is the master.

This image reveals to us the existence of three currents animating the human being. Let's
call them “intellectual”, “emotional” and “motor” 2 . In its normal state, the whole system is
in working order: the coachman holds the reins firmly in his hands and leads the crew -
along the route indicated to him by the master.

In the vast majority of cases, this is not how things happen. First of all, the master is
absent. The crew must fetch him to be at his disposal. Everything is in poor condition: the
axles are not greased and squeal; the wheels are loose; the drawbar has a dangerous game;
the horses, although of noble stock, are dirty and badly fed; the harnesses are worn and the
reins are not strong. The coachman sleeps. His hands have slipped on his knees and are
barely holding the reins which could slip away from them at any moment. The team is
moving forward despite everything, but in a way that does not bode well. Aban giving the
road, it engages on a slope so that the carriage pushes the horses which do not retain it any
more. Plunged into a deep sleep, the coachman sways on his seat and risks falling.
  

In our daily life, the three centers are anarchic, often encroaching on the domain of the
other. A failure of the motor center can disturb the emotional and intellectual centers.
Hormonal imbalance can alter behavior. Having slept badly can make us unrecognizable!
—————————————————————————

Center : intellectual

Function: save, think, calculate, combine, search, etc. If my eyes cannot see themselves
'seeing', I am nevertheless conscious of seeing. I observe myself, I notice my own reactions,
I compare myself with what I would like to be. I affirm myself by becoming aware of my
identity. Something in me centralizes the data of the external senses, compares them and
brings out the common characteristics. It is a reflective activity, in the true sense of the
word “reflection”.
—————————————————————————

Center: emotional

Function: Governs feelings and refined sensations and passions. The faculty of feeling is
exercised in and through organs. It undergoes the action of objects perceptible to the
senses. These produce representations of perceived objects. These representations make
known the aspects of the bodies grasped by the five external senses. A fluid faculty,
memory, preserves these representations.
—————————————————————————

Center: motor

Function: directs the five senses, accumulates energy in the body through its instinctive
functions. Presides, through its motor functions, over the consumption of this energy. Thus,
at the beginning of their existence, living beings are imperfect from the quantitative point
of view; the child does not come into the world measuring 1.80 m! It takes an active power
by which living beings reach the size that should be theirs. This increase is possible because
something becomes the substance of what must increase and is added to it. The
preservation of the individual requires a power which restores to him what he has lost,
confers upon him what he lacks to attain the perfection of his stature and what he needs to
engender the seed necessary for his reproduction. The motor center is the best organized
of the three. While the other two are formed as the child grows and develops, the motor
center functions from conception. It is the oldest and the best ordered.
—————————————————————————

We have neither pure thought nor pure feeling. Neither are our actions pure. In us,
everything is mixed, entangled. Most often, it is by all sorts of considerations coming
sometimes from the intellectual center which, by its calculations, taints the purity of the
feeling, sometimes from the emotional center which scrambles the calculations of the
intellectual center. Without having understood how it works, it is impossible for us to bring
order to our psychic life, to pull it out of its permanent anarchy. Beware of cleaning only the
outside of the vase. Let's avoid the madness that ravaged the 19th century ; religion without
psychology.

Self‐knowledge or self‐contemplation of the ego?

 

Taking up the famous motto of Delphi, the Pythagorean adage taught: “Know thyself and
you will know the universe and the gods. A simplistic rationalism has reduced it to "Know
thyself" to finally read "Psychoanalyze your ego". The universe and the gods have been
taken away. A bad sleight of hand transformed a metaphysical experience into a
psychological process. Nothing is more alien to Socrates or Plato than such an
interpretation. Mental phenomena are exterior modifications – and not the essence – of
being.

Self-knowledge is not an end, but a means. How not to find that yourself? How to avoid a
sterile egocentrism followed by its procession of vague daydreams, meaningless analyses,
anguished introspections and vain displays of oneself? How not to find the only emotions of
sensitivity or confused restlessness? How to distinguish what is man (nature) and who he
is (person)? A single answer: the soul must not seek to know itself by analyzing itself
directly, but it must seek itself under the light of God. In self exploration, God illuminates
the depths of the soul. It produces effects there, just as the rays of the sun, playing through
the branches of a tree, enrich them with various tones. It is advisable to guard against a
madness which ravaged the 20th century : psychology without religion 3 .

A radiant crystal crowded with reptiles

 

God must not make us forget the soul which serves as his temple. All spiritual life is
embodied in a psychology which must be taken into account. How can we organize our
inner life without knowing the framework in which it must take place? It would be to doom
yourself to failure. We cannot walk towards God without knowing the structure of the soul,
its possibilities, its deficiencies, the laws which regulate its activity.

The inner world is complex and changing. Forces move in all directions. In this fog,
however, we distinguish two regions:

• an external and usually agitated region, in which move on the one hand the imagination
which creates and furnishes the images, and on the other hand the understanding which
reasons and discourses. These two faculties are fickle and cannot remain chained for long,
even by a powerful will;

• a more interior and more peaceful region where the intelligence properly speaking, the
will and the essence of the soul are found, which are closer to the spirit, more docile to the
celestial fire despite the external agitations.

To give an idea of the inestimable value of the human soul, Teresa of Avila compares it to
the

"palace where the King dwells", to "a castle composed entirely of a single diamond or a
very pure crystal", a "castle filled with splendor and beauty, an oriental pearl, a tree of life
planted in the middle living waters of the life that is in God”.

 
 In this interior castle irradiated by the divine presence, Thérèse discovered a “ crowd of
snakes, vipers and venomous reptiles ”. These reptiles constitute one of the most important
objects of self-knowledge. Created in the state of perfection, our first parents had received
gifts concerning the intermediate world (dominion of the passions, preservation of illness
and death) which ensured the harmony of the natural powers. As a result of the fall, the
duality of the forces of body and soul is affirmed and spread out. While waiting for death
which will dissociate them, each of them demands its own satisfactions.

These tendencies take particular forms according to the education received, the milieu
frequented, the habits acquired. They exercise an almost peaceful reign over the soul in the
first stages of spiritual life. Fighted by the initiate, they become irritated. The victory
obtained over their exterior action in the following degree leaves them with their interior
strength. They then feed on elements of lesser appearance and will reappear alive on the
spiritual plane when the divine light discovers them.

Through this examination, we will attain true silence. To achieve this, it is necessary to
observe without judgment what passes in us. Then let the fire operate. The work that is
asked of us is found in alchemy where the artist must separate the subtle (Sulfur, Salt,
Mercury) from the thick (Phlegm and Dead Head) which imprisons it. In the man who
prays, the celestial fire separates the subtle (the pneuma) from its mortal alloy with the
psychic substance (the psyche). This process of internal alchemy, Paul teaches us:

"The word of God (Logos) is effective and sharper than a two-edged sword penetrating to
the separation of soul and spirit . " »
 Ratings
 

1. The Phaedrus myth compares the human soul to a chariot drawn by two horses, one
good, the other bad. The Republic contains the same comparison . The charioteer is the noùs
, the reason. The good horse is the principle of generous appetites. The bad horse is the
principle of low appetites. The nous resides in the head, the principle of generous appetites
in the heart, the principle of low appetites in the belly. The chariot will work well if the
coachman holds his two horses firmly in hand so that they obey his impulses and directions
without flinching. Likewise a soul will be in a state of equilibrium, health and happiness if
the two principles of the appetites are fully subject to reason. It is up to her to decide what
to grant to each of these sources of passion. It is up to her to regulate and coordinate
everything intelligently. Thus disciplined, a soul possesses all the virtues. She is cautious,
temperate, courageous and fair. She has everything that a human soul can acquire in terms
of balance, health, harmony, beauty and consequently happiness. (Reprinted from André
Cresson, Plato , PUF, Paris, 1956.)

2. It is a question of what medieval philosophy calls the rational soul, the sensitive soul
and the vegetative soul respectively .

3. An analyst like Victor Frankl clearly distinguished the psychic and spiritual spheres.

4. Hebrews 4, 12.
 THE YOUNG
 

I give you all the herbs bearing seed, which are on the whole surface of the earth, and all the
trees which have fruit bearing seed: this will be your food.

GENESIS 1, 29
 The body has its place
 

It is dangerous to compel oneself to exercises (oration, various rites) if the body does not
adapt to the new organization they lead to.

The spiritual ways have understood this. During his progression, they offer the neophyte
certain physical disciplines (fasting, manual work, vigil) which should not be confused with
pathological mortifications 1 . Obsessive asceticism leads those who engage in it to the
opposite of the intended objectives. It leads to self-centered development of will,
endurance and resistance. It is striking to note how certain occultists and certain priests
seem to be imprisoned psychically and physically. Without a single word being exchanged,
the clairvoyant mind perceives the rigidity emanating from them.

These asceticisms, pursued in abandonment to the divine, favor physical and psychic
regeneration. The accomplished adept maintains a frugal diet throughout his life. In view of
his mental and physical balance, no one would imagine that he feeds for months on a
quantity of food barely sufficient for an infant 2 .

The transition to food

 

There are links between food and the fall of man. Formerly, doctors asked the real
question: how, concretely, an immortal being, image and likeness of God, could he have
become mortal and subject to death?

According to Eckartshausen, Adam poisoned himself in such a way that his immortal
being took refuge inside his person; the outward appearance was covered with a deadly
element. The inorganic body of light darkened, causing matter to tighten into itself. So the
body of light materialized and became divisible. Light energy, the very substance of Adam,
was killed. The celestial body became a body of flesh and blood, the strong Adamic energy
was replaced by bones. He looked like an incandescent iron cooling down. In his Aurum
Potabile , the medical astrologer Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654) notes:

“They know that the Garden of Eden, in which Adam was created…was created of pure,
uncorrupted elements, equally and harmoniously proportioned, equal in the highest
perfection. And that where man lived, all substance was pure, made up of pure elements,
not elemental elements like the rest of the world was, which the Lord had made for beasts
to live there. And, if there was no corruption in the Garden, how could there be mortality?...
We conceive that the ancient lightning philosophers waxed the cause of this change, how
man, being immortal, came to put on mortality. This is what they found: After the man had
sinned, God led him or put him out of the Garden to live among the beasts in the corruptible
world which was composed, not of pure elements, but of elemental elements, unequally
proportionate in heat, cold, dryness and humidity. Being there, seeing that he could not live
without nourishment, he was forced to draw his sustenance from the corrupt food,
whereby those pure elements of which he was were infected, and by degrees (though very
slowly) he declined from incorruption to corruption, until finally one quality 3 exceeded the
other in his body, as it did in the food he ate to survive. So his body became subject to
corruption, then from corruption he became subject to infirmity and sickness, then from
sickness he became subject to death. »

What should humans eat?

 

In the Garden of Eden, the Lord had prescribed a certain diet for man:

"I give you all the herbs bearing seed, which are on the whole surface of the earth, and all
the trees which have fruit bearing seed: this shall be your food . »

It is only after the Flood that man eats flesh, without blood 5 . Until the Flood, men and
beasts lived in peace without devouring each other. Then dietary ethics degenerated into a
multitude of implausible prescriptions. Clement of Alexandria suggests that

“no doubt a Gnostic will abstain from eating meat 6 ”.

Testifying to the monk's effort to recreate Paradise, the consumption of meat is

prohibited in Orthodox monasteries. The laity abstain from it during the Lenten fast.

The lifting of food restrictions

 
 If the food prohibitions of the Old Testament were lifted by the New, fasting is
nevertheless mentioned in the Bible. Several long fasts are related there, such as that of
Moses, forty days 7 ; that of Elijah, forty days 8 ; David, seven days 9 ; Jesus, forty days 10 ; Luke,
“ I fast twice in week 11 ”; a fast throughout Judea 12 . The Bible warns against fasting for the
sake of mere notoriety . She advises fasting people not to succumb to a sad attitude 14 , but to find
pleasure in fasting and to accomplish their work 15 , some fasts having to be fasts of
cheerfulness 16 . The Gospels state that, along with prayer, fasting is the supreme weapon
against demons: “ This kind cannot go out by anything but prayer and fasting 17 . In Latin
Christianity, the four fasts, nicknamed the "Four Times", divide the year into four seasons:
winter, spring, summer, autumn. They once existed in Byzantium.

Fasting prepares the body by lightening it. It obliges man to see within himself the
functioning of his passions. Like work, vigil and continence, its purpose is to pierce slits in
the human shell through which the celestial fire will flow.

On the faith of the serpent, Eve had given credence to the deifying virtue of the eating of
an earthly fruit. Adam had eaten this fruit. Mistake ! What was deifying was precisely not to
eat it, to acquiesce in the prohibition, therefore to recognize this fruit as separate, reserved
for God, sacred.
 Ratings
 

1. Until the Counter-Reformation, monasteries produced elixirs and other substances

that supported the body. During the wars of religion, the Protestants who invaded the
monasteries saw in them proofs of paganism.

2. We are not into yoga-fiction. In religious matters, these cases are well documented,
like that of Thérèse Neumann, who remained alive for decades without food or drink,
without producing any excretion. This phenomenon is called inedia (from the Latin inedia )
. The accompanying religious neuroses are real, but they are not sufficient to explain
survival in the absence of food. This being specified, if these long abstinences from food are
accompanied by a sickly disposition and a suspension of the normal activities of life, it is
not a question of a process of regeneration. Among the old adepts, the uninterrupted
performance of daily duties went hand in hand with joy and frugal nourishment.

3. These are the primary qualities of which all bodies are formed: Hot, Cold, Dry and
Humid. Hot and Cold are generated by radical heat (the Latin radix means root, foundation,
source, origin), itself symbolized by the luminous intensity of the sun. Wet and Dry are
generated by radical humidity, symbolized by the moving brilliance of the moon. All life is
maintained by a moderate balance of heat and humidity. It is endangered by excessive
drought or cold. (Cf. Denis Labouré, Practical Course in Astrology , Chariot d'Or, Saint-Chef,
2004.)

4. Gen 1, 29.

5. Gen 9, 3-4.

6. Stromata VII , Chapter VI.

7. Ex 24, 18; Ex 34, 28.

8. 1R 19, 8.

9. 2S 12, 20.

10. Mt 4, 2.

11. Lk 18, 12.

12. 2 Ch 20, 3.

13. Mt 6, 17-18.
14. Mt 6, 16.

15. Is 58, 3.

16. Za 8, 19.

17. Mk 9, 29.
 THE SILENCE
 

A voice, a subtle silence 1 .

1 KINGS 19, 12
 Learn to be silent to listen
 

Spiritual teachings are striking in their common requirement of silence; outer silence and
inner silence. Jesus himself withdrew into the solitudes to pray. In his instructions, a
conditioning precedes the prayer:

“As for you, when you pray, retire to your room, close the door behind you, and pray to
your Father who is there in secret; and your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you . »

For the ordinary man, silence is unbearable torture. It may well promise the most
absolute silence on what it will see and hear, it will speak. The man who talks a lot and who
talks to himself a lot is the loudspeaker of what he has not digested. He killed the depth in
him. Being silent makes you attentive and promotes discernment:

“If someone does not stray from words, he is a perfect man, he is able to restrain his
whole body. When we put a bit in the mouth of horses, to make them obey us, we direct
their whole body. Look again at the vessels: however large they may be, even pushed by
violent winds, they are steered by a very small rudder, at the whim of the pilot. Likewise
the tongue is a tiny member and it can boast of great things! See what little fire kindles an
immense forest: the tongue is also a fire. It is the world of evil, this tongue placed among
our members: it defiles the whole body; it inflames the cycle of Creation, inflamed as it is by
Gehenna. Wild beasts and birds, reptiles and sea animals of all kinds are tamed and have
been tamed by man. The tongue, on the contrary, no one can tame: it is a scourge without
rest. It is full of deadly venom 3 . »

Monastic tradition prescribes silence, but it would be wrong to see this as a vow of
absolute silence. In the most rigorous of monasteries, there are recreations, walks, parlors,
community activities of all kinds. In most cases, like the reading of the Scriptures done
during meals, monastic silence emphasizes the essential word.

As he progresses, the initiate sees the futility of worldly relations. Outer silence prepares
for inner silence. Let's look at people participating in a conversation. We find that instead of
listening for oneself, that is to say to learn, and speaking for others, everyone speaks for
themselves and listens to others out of politeness. Everyone wants to place their ideas and
seeks the right opportunity to do so. While waiting for it to present itself, we listen with
more or less patience and attention to what is being said. An interview conducted in this
way is a dialogue of the deaf from which nothing is learned. At the time of separation, each
of the participants carries the luggage with which he had come. This kind of conversation
causes a loss of energy. The important thing is not to be silent, but to know what you are
saying. To be silent means to speak within well-defined limits. The man must say what is
necessary, when it is necessary and to whom it is necessary. The quality of silence and its
corollary, the quality of speech, are related to the abandonment of the masks that man
imposes on himself.

The silence of the soul

 

To be in silence, it is not enough for us to be silent. Our mind screams, our emotions
scream, our body screams. Man can live in apparent solitude and abstain from uttering a
single word while deep down inside he is restless and restless. To access this silence, the
work to be done is considerable:

“There is a man who seems to be silent, but his heart condemns others; such a man talks
incessantly. But there is another who speaks from morning till night, and yet he keeps
silence, that is to say he says nothing without use for the others 4 . »

On the occasion of one of his answers, John of Gaza distinguished interior silence and
exterior silence. A brother living in community felt that his work as carpenter of the
monastery was a cause of inconvenience and distraction. He asked to become a hermit in
order to “ practice the silence of which the Fathers speak ”. Jean refused this request:

“Like most, you do not understand what is meant by the silence of which the Fathers
speak. Silence is not about keeping your lips closed. A man who speaks tens of thousands of
words can remain silent, while the one who speaks a useless word must remember that he
is breaking the commandment of the Lord: “On the day of judgment you will give an
account for every useless word that comes out of your mouth 5 ”. »

The objective silence

 

Inner silence is the most important. External silence has value only insofar as it favors it.
Silence is not just about separating right ideas from wrong ideas. It aims to recognize the
origin, the nature and the finality of the passional germs, fleeting suggestions, obsessive
impulses rising from our soul. On this condition it is possible to dwell before God and
remain in His presence unceasingly, day and night. The neophyte must know how to be
silent by mouth and by thoughts, whether he is sleeping or awake. Like Ulysses who
plugged the ears of his companions with wax so as not to give in to the seduction of the
sirens, his soul must remain insensitive to the rumors of human suggestion. Through this
asceticism, the purified soul ceases to be a battlefield between the conflicting thoughts that
agitate the ordinary man. Gradually, a distinction is established between consciousness and
mental agitation. It becomes possible to hear the inner voice that spoke unheard, the
profane man listening only to his own babble.

Activism is another form of noise. Like chatter, it can disturb the silence in which God
makes himself heard to the soul. It poses an even more delicate problem than that of
speech. By dispersing energies, by identifying with what is unfolding around us, by the
anxieties that accompany it, activism destroys recollection. It makes prayer impossible.
Activity overflows daily life to the point of leaving no room for prayer. This activism covers
itself with numerous and noble excuses: necessities of life, urgent duties, trepidation of the
atmosphere which leads and dissipates, joys of action which expands and expands.

spiritual silence
 

But this is still a subjective silence, which consists in progressively eliminating language
and concepts. It must end in an objective silence, which qualifies what is experienced of
God himself. For Hesychius of Batos,

“silence is having completely overcome all discourse, it is freedom from all images,
sensitive and intellectual : the soul must be totally free of images 6 ”.

The "return to oneself" is described by Basil the Great and Isaac the Syrian:

“When the mind no longer dissipates itself among external things and no longer scatters
itself through the world by means of its senses, it returns to itself and by its own means
makes the ascent towards the thought of God 7 . »

When Yahweh speaks to Elijah, what does Elijah perceive after these precursory signs
that are the wind and the fire? " A voice, a subtle silence 8 . This is the highest and most
rigorous expression that can be given of the encounter with God . It is of the order of
listening, but beyond the senses:

“Be at peace with your own soul and so heaven and earth will be at peace with you. Enter
fervently into the treasure chamber hidden in your soul and you will thus discover the
things that dwell in the heavens because there is only one access to both. The ladder
leading to the Kingdom is hidden in your soul. Flee from sin, dive into yourself, and in your
soul you will discover the steps to begin your ascent 9 . »

It is in the center of the soul that God lives, acts, carries out divinizing operations. What
do external noise and activity matter, provided that silence reigns in these regions! In the
story of Creation, the evening precedes the morning, the night the day, the invisible Creator
the visible created. Silence precedes the word, the Father the Son. Silence is the uncreated
verb of the Father which precedes the voice of the Son.
 Ratings
 

1. I have recourse to the translation of André Chouraqui, because, where a subtle silence
reigns, the Jerusalem Bible hears “the sound of a light breeze”! The Hebrew text gives Qol
demamah daqqah , the voice of penetrating silence. Qol is not a noise, nor even a sound, but
a voice. The word comes back immediately when Yahweh speaks: “A voice said to him:
what are you doing there, Elijah? Demamah means a silence, according to the very meaning
of the root damam . Daqqah means what slices and penetrates, and secondarily what is
sliced, torn to pieces, therefore tenuous, impalpable, like the dust of a pulverized object.

2. Mt 6, 6.

3. Jas III, 2-8.

4. The Apophthegms of the Fathers of the Desert (Poemen 27, p. 222), Texts of oriental
spirituality, Bégrolles, 1966.

5. Barsanuphus and John, Quaest. and resp ., § 554.

6. Quoted by Florovsky, Georges, in The Byzantine fathers of the 5th in the eighth centuries ,
Institute of Orthodox Theology Saint-Serge, Paris, 1997.

7. Basil, Ep. 2 (PG 32, 228 A).

8. 1 Kings 19, 12.

9. Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh , English translation of Bedjan's text into Syriac, by
AJ Wensinck (Amsterdam, 1923) p. 8 (adapted translation ).
 THE BREATH
 

Let everything that breathes praise Yahweh!

PSALM 150, 6
 From the breath of God to the breath of man
 

To acquire union with God, two rhythms are used: that of breathing and that of blood.
The rhythm of breathing seems the only one we can use voluntarily. The Creation story
emphasizes the correspondence between the breath of God – the Spirit – and the vital
breath of man:

“Then Yahweh God molded man out of the clay of the ground, he breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being 1 . »

The Spirit, within the absolute, is the “ Breath which utters the Word 2 ”; thus, when the
human breath, in prayer, utters the Name of the Incarnate Word (Jesus Christ), it unites
with the divine breath, becomes its vehicle. Gradually, the man begins to breathe the spirit 3
» .

If the breathing is not correct, the whole man is in disorder. Any disruption of breathing
shows a disruption of man which influences what he is and does. Right breathing is the
movement of life which with one beat is given and with another is received. Consciously
experienced during prayer, this movement seizes man to transform him through a
continual death and rebirth, constantly deepened.

The Fathers advise to center the prayer on the breathing:

“Let the memory of Jesus be one with your breath, and then you will know the usefulness
of hesychia 4 . »

The monk utters the first half of his invocation during inspiration and the second half
during expiration. This movement recalls the injunction of King David:

“Let everything that breathes praise Yahweh 5 ! »

Between the drops of time

 
 On the one hand, time appears to us as a condition of the structuring of physical matter.
On the other hand, it appears to us as a cause of degeneration. At no time do we know the
present of the world. The knowledge of the present escapes us. We perceive it as an
incessant becoming. Man is torn between a future that still does not exist and a past that is
irretrievably over. Only his memory and the slowness of his organism's reactions give him
the feeling of a present time in which his sensations are exercised and his actions take
place.

Perpetual prayer is based on the repetition of the same rhythmic verbal movement, of a
maintained vibration which puts us in resonance with pure vibration. At each drop of time
we are in the created, between the drops, in the uncreated. The rapid succession of the
drops makes us believe in a non-existent continuity, just as we admire a pretty face which
is only an empty cloud. The 1/20 th of a second is more than enough in the cinema, for the
persistence of retinal impressions. Our inertia, our heaviness, our heaviness allow the
illusion of continuity. Thanks to these intervals, between the temporal drops, we are, by
participation, in Eternity. From then on, we become, always by participation, creators.
Eternity is not eternal present (static) but eternal youth (dynamic).

This is the purpose of perpetual prayer and the rosary. This is the reason for their quick
result. Our thought and our continuous will remain tense between the drops of repeated
words, tense in a continuous way because out of time. Our pneuma being always in the
Eternal, our psyche cascades through the grains of time.

If we represent a complete breath as a space, we can represent the breath by this

diagram:

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIII

The bars that delimit the spacings represent the instants separating each complete
breath from the next. With the practice of prayer, the bars are erased. First one, between
two breaths, then two. And so on up to a certain limit. The slot of the present moment is
widened:

“He who is as if he did not exist and as if he had never been born, has become – what
bliss! – nothing but God 6 . »

Master Eckart evokes this eternal present:

“His gifts [of God] are of an absolute simplicity, of a perfection which does not suffer any
division; they are timeless, eternal. I am as certain of it as I am certain of living. To welcome
what he grants us, we must be in eternity, we must surpass time. In eternity everything is
present to us: what is above me is as near and present to me as what is beside me; it is
there that we receive from God what we must receive from him 7 . »

The being of the initiate, and not just his existence in the passing world, grows. He
rediscovers the conditions of the timeless moment in which the first story of Creation takes
place. Instead of creating "green grass, lights, fish or birds", he creates himself from a germ.
Condensed of the universe, man must create himself, spiritually and supernaturally, thanks
to the supporting creative Eternity. Each of us realizes a new and unique Creation of
himself and in himself.
 Ratings
 

1. Gen 2, 7.

2. John Damascene, De fid. orth. , PG 95, 60 D.

3. Of the Contemplative Life , in Little Philokalia of the Prayer of the Heart , tr. and int. by J.
Gouillard, Books of Life nos . 83-84 , p. 185.

4. John Climacus, The Holy Ladder 27, 62.

5. Ps 150, 6.

6. Angelus Silesius, The Cherubic Pilgrim , 1, 92.

7. Maître Eckart, Love makes us become what we love , One Thousand and One Nights
(Fayard), Paris, 2000.
 THE TRANSPARENCY OF THE BODY
 

Indeed, this corruptible being must put on incorruptibility, this mortal being must put on
immortality.

1 CORINTHIANS 15, 53
 When the priest becomes an actor
 

Imagine a school where the masters give their lessons and their demonstrations, without
knowing that these are lessons and demonstrations. And whose students or simple
listeners would take these lessons and demonstrations for banal ceremonies. Insofar as the
meaning is lost, lesson and demonstration become boring for the teacher as well as for the
pupils. Everyone begins to use their imagination to make what is happening more
attractive.

Too often, in parish churches, the altar is a stage. The liturgist is an actor. He does what
he can to capture the attention of his audience. And when the discourse takes precedence
over the Mystery, when the ministry disappears behind the spectacle and the artistry of the
animator, when the search for emotional unanimity supplants silence, something is lost.
The priest has forgotten his vocation as mediator between God and men 1 .

The right gesture

 

In the past, the movements unfolded in the choir. The priest lived the ceremony down to
the smallest gesture and down to his fingertips, like a sacred dance. The fulfillment of the
liturgy requires a certain number of movements. The priest learns to execute each of them
with perfection, then to chain them all. Done in the dispositions of active observation, this
gives, not only for the one who sees it, but for the one who lives it, the possibility of a
contact with the Divine. When the priest submits himself for months to the rigor of the
exercises of relaxation, breathing, the right attitude and pure gesture, the pose of the voice
and the practice of singing, he understands that he acts to enter fully into the rite; body,
soul and spirit. Each liturgy can even transform its body and give transparency to its form.

sacred space
 

One cannot listen to a symphony or look at a painting in a room where there is an

unbearable smell of gas. In the church, everything is linked. The architecture takes into
account an effect as discreet as that of the ribbons of incense waving on the frescoes and
embracing the pillars. The volutes of these ribbons expand the architectural spaces of the
church to infinity, attenuating the dryness and rigor of the lines, seeming to merge them,
infusing them with movement and life. Let's observe the rhythm of the celebrants, the play
of light on the folds of precious fabrics, the scents of incense, the atmosphere ionized by the
flames of thousands of candles.

The Christian temple meets two requirements; to be the palace of the Invisible and to
house the assembly of the faithful. Two errors are to be avoided: neglecting the community
by being content to build the dwelling of the divine presence, or worrying only about the
meeting room of the faithful. This latter tendency appeared among Protestants and among
the builders of the modern churches of the Catholic world. They sought to design the
architecture and decor stripped, not so much to welcome the Invisible as to group believers
around the communion table or the preacher's word.

The temple, symbol of the human body, has a particularity: it is not the architecture that
expresses it but its plan. The church is built on the reclining man, the man's body is the
foundation of the building. The reclining body is the perfect body of Christ. The lying body
of the plan of the church is also that of a dead person (the liturgy is celebrated on the relics
of the martyrs) who must recover during the resurrection. The common sense of urban
planner Jean-Gaston Bardet is more relevant than ever:

“The church, the temple of God, must therefore be suitable for the whole Trinity. And
immediately, faced with the Majesty and the Eternity of the Father, we are led to ask
ourselves this question: does such a projected building evoke the eternal or the ephemeral?
Will it remain in the centuries as an authentic testimony or is it only a passing fad, the
whim of the architect who wants to be noticed, instead of seeking the exaltation of God
alone?... If the Father is “without form and without figure”, the Son, he was incarnated and
immediately we encounter a holy tradition, that which gave the church the cruciform plan.
In our time of social upheaval, you well understand the importance of this. The church
could be decommissioned, its priests driven out, the enemies of God could temporarily -
transform its use, even make it blasphemous, they could not change the plan, the cross
would remain engraved in the ground... A church is not a theatre, a cinema where the union
is made only by sight between the officiants and the people; true union takes place within
each faithful, in each priest. It is wrong to want to transform the church into a simple shed
without support, without more withdrawn, more intimate corners. It is necessary that each
faithful can find either the open air of the main nave during the great Sunday ceremonies,
or the half-light of the sides, the intimacy of the pillars and the secondary chapels;
especially during the week, because the church does not only serve on Sunday mornings…
Finally, the church is the temple of the Holy Spirit, containing those other temples of the
Holy Spirit that each “new man” must be. Everything must be pure there, like the beeswax,
the wheat or the wine used in the liturgy. Everything must reproduce the very structure of
Creation, which is a tangled structure, crisscrossed with intertwined fibers that bear no
resemblance to those cast or molded materials such as cast iron, modern plastics or
concrete. As for this purity of materials, it is like the purity of the body 2 …”
  

How to clean the unconscious?

 

Participation in the liturgy commits the Christian as a whole person. When he is invited
to prostrate himself, to submit in an authentic way to the One who is above him, he can go
far in his depth if he is ready to give himself totally, to leave his little self outside. . He
becomes humble, able to let go not only of an outer facade, the will to have, to know and to
be able, but also many inner things. A genuinely religious being realizes the lies hidden
behind the mask. Under the action of celestial fire, many knots come undone. True
religiosity is a good instrument to cleanse the unconscious.

The secret of tears

 

In his Theological Chapters , Symeon describes the overwhelming experience of baptism

with water and the spirit. The true baptism, of which the first is the figure, is the tears
without pain which flow spontaneously and purify us under the action of the divine light:

“During the night, our bodily eyes only look to where we eventually light the lamp that
gives light, and the rest of the world for us is only night. Thus, for those who sleep in the
night of sin, our good master appears only as a dim light, he the God whom the universe
cannot contain, out of respect for our weakness. It is then that suddenly, raising his eyes
and contemplating the nature of beings as he has never seen it before, man is overwhelmed
and spontaneous tears spring up without pain, which purify him and confer on him a
second baptism, this baptism of which Our Lord speaks in the Gospel: “If anyone is not
reborn by water and the Spirit, he will not enter the kingdom of heaven. » Or again « If
someone is not reborn from above », by saying « from above » the Lord signified the birth
of the Spirit. In the first baptism water is the symbol of tears and the oil of the anointing
prefigures the interior anointing of the Spirit; but the second baptism is no longer the
figure of truth, it is truth itself. »

Once the nature of the sacrament is understood, certain gestures no longer surprise us.
When certain Greek monks receive this gift of tears, they collect one of them and place it on
the tongue of the novice. The raw material of the Great Work never comes from external
accessories.
 Ratings
 

1. Hb 5.1.

2. Jean-Gaston Bardet, The Keys to Fundamental Research , Maloine, Paris, 1978.

 MYSTERIES
 

He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.

JOHN 6, 5-6
 water, blood and flesh
 

The energies contained in the glorified body of Christ are communicated to his initiates
and ensure their deification. This communication takes place, among other means, through
the sacraments that the Eastern tradition calls “Mysteries 1 ”. The Greek word mysterion
here does not mean "secret", "occult", "hidden", at least primarily. It designates in the first
place a transcendent reality which can be veiled, but which can also be the object of a
revelation, without however losing its name of mysterion . This word appears twenty-one
times in Paul, four times in the Apocalypse , three times in the Synoptic Gospels in a parallel
passage.

Two sacraments, Baptism – followed by Confirmation 2 – and the Eucharist, form the
main Mysteries on which the deification of man depends. Preaching about the wound made
by the soldier at the side of Jesus on the cross, John Chrysostom summarizes:

“It is not simply by chance that the two springs have sprung up, but it is because from
them the Church has been formed: and those who are initiated know that they have been
regenerated by the water and nourished by blood and by flesh. It is from there that the
Mysteries draw their origin 3 . »

Baptism
 

Baptism introduces man into the divinizing principle of uncreated energies:

“As the branch cannot of itself bear fruit unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you
unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you, the branches 4 . »

The waters of baptism regenerate a man from within, as leaven makes dough rise. It
illuminates the “in the image” and restores it to its initial splendour. It opens up the
possibility of becoming "in likeness". Confirmation intensifies these energies and their
action. By tracing the sign of the cross on it and saying " the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit
", the Orthodox priest successively anoints the forehead, the eyes, the nostrils, the lips, the
ears, the chest, the hands and feet of the baptized. It animates the faculties of man
symbolized by those bodily organs which receive the vivifying, illuminating and deifying
energy of celestial fire.

the eucharist
 

In all religions, there are ritual meals. They eat, among other things, the flesh of sacrificed
animals. But there is rarely any question of eating the god! The heart of the Christian
Mystery is the eucha ristia . More specifically, it is the ritual recitation of the words and
gestures of Christ at the Last Supper, as he blesses the bread 5 and the wine before giving
them to his disciples:

“Take, eat, this is my body… Drink it all; for this is my blood 6 …”

Let us agree on the meaning and scope of the word “rite”. A rite is a word, a gesture, or a
set of words and gestures, of supra-human origin. Attached to this set of words and
gestures is a spiritual energy capable of realizing what they mean. This ritual recitation is
performed by an agent invested, by the divine authority that created the rite, with the
power to perform this rite. Christ himself ordered his apostles to perform this ritual
recitation:

“Do this in memory of me . »

The performance of this rite is not a ceremony like ringing the dead in front of the Arc de
Triomphe. It is not a memorial intended to revive the memory of Jesus in hearts. The ritual
recitation of the words and gestures of Christ does not commemorate ancient events; she
reiterates them. This celebration re-presents – in the etymological sense of the word, that is
to say “makes present again” – the divine work. Ritual recitation takes us out of ordinary
time; it places us back in the primordial time in which the event took place 8 . The mass is an
effective reproduction of the event, it introduces us to it; it makes us contemporaries of
Christ, of his action and of his person. The celebrant reproduces what Christ did and said. In
this gesture and this word, the same thing happens as in the beginning. The original act is
repeated; the original actor makes himself present in the ritual celebration.

How is it possible ? Out of time, a celestial liturgy takes place. John sees her. He describes
it in Revelation 9 : the Lamb slain, but alive, on a throne, the twenty-four elders adoring him
while playing the zither and burning incense, the multitudes of angels as well as all the
creatures singing the praises of the Lamb and the eternal Amen. We find, in another form,
the idea of the celestial sacrifice in the letter to the Hebrews 10 . Thus the Mass has its
prototype in the heavenly sacrifice of the Lamb described by Revelation . The visible liturgy
is the symbol of the celestial liturgy. It is its refraction in the sensible world within which
man moves during earthly existence. The liturgy perceptible to the senses, that which we
see, which we hear, which we touch, which we smell, which we taste, unfolds on the
temporal plane something which belongs to eternity. The liturgy that is celebrated is the
visible form of the eternal, timeless mass described by the Apocalypse . This celestial
archetype of the liturgy is the true liturgy, always present, perpetually in action.

The mass is not the repetition or the reproduction of the historic act which was the
sacrifice of Christ, something impossible. It is not even the representation of it. The
consecration by the priest who performs the sacrifice is the visible manifestation of an
eternal act. The visible, earthly Mass is the medium through which we participate in the
celestial liturgy. The sacrifice of Calvary itself, as a historical fact, is a manifestation -
admittedly to an extraordinary degree - on earth, of the eternal sacrifice of "the Lamb
immolated from the origin of the world ", 11 which is precisely the liturgy celestial.

What is the role of the Eucharist in the process of divinization? Each Mass is like a
beating of the heart of Christ in his body which is the community of Christians, like an
injection of divine-human blood into all its members. Through the Eucharist, man
participates in a fire that transfigures and does not consume:

“Through this sacrament, God mixes with our perishable nature in order to deify
humanity by making them share in his divinity 12 . […] This is why He distributes Himself as
a seed to all believers, according to the plan of grace, in this flesh composed of wine and
bread, and He mingles Himself with the body [of believers] to enable man, through union
with the immortal body, to participate in incorruptibility 13 . »

Linking the story of the Last Supper and the sacrifice of the cross, Western theologians
see in bread and wine the body and blood of Christ immolated, dead and buried on the altar
which itself represents the cross and the tomb. Through the Eucharist, the human being
unites himself to the deified flesh of Christ and acquires incorruptibility as a share.

The Eastern Church insists that the Spirit is present in this mystery. Often, it is called
"fire" by the Syrian tradition. At the invocation of the celebrant, the Spirit comes to rest on
these oblates 14 representing Christ laid in the tomb. There he operates a restoration, a re-
creation analogous to that which he carried out on Easter morning on the body of the
Saviour. He transforms them into a principle of life capable of deifying the assembly that
receives them through communion:

“It is the Bread of Life that changes, transforms, assimilates the one who eats it 15 . »

 
 There is an indwelling of Christ in the Christian and of the Christian in Christ:

“He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him . »

This reception of the Spirit through the Eucharist is affirmed by Isaac of Antioch (5th
century ).
To exhort the faithful to approach the Eucharistic table, he proclaims:

“Come and drink, eat the flame that will make you angels of fire, and taste (through your
mouth) the flavor of the Holy Spirit so that your names may be inscribed among the
spiritual powers 17 ! »

We could multiply the testimonies. This, taken from Matins of the second Sunday after
Pentecost celebrated in the Church of Antioch, affirms the presence of the Spirit in the
Eucharist and compares it to the presence of fire in the oven:

“Behold, the body and the blood are an oven in which the Holy Spirit is the fire 18 . »

In the celebration, where the Holy Spirit actualizes, manifests the death and resurrection
of Christ, the body of death is gradually saturated with eternity , begins its metamorphosis
into a body of glory;

“Matter…receives within itself the strength of God . »

The fallen modality of nature is reabsorbed into its glorified modality. What the ancient
prayer of the Roman Mass states:

“God, who established human nature in an admirable nobility, and who restored it in an
even more admirable manner: grant us, by the sacramental mystery of this water and this
wine, to have part in the divinity of Him who deigned to take part in our humanity. »
 Ratings
 

1. Alchemists have emphasized the analogy between the operations of nature – which
come under natural revelation – and the sacraments. Thus, Pierre Jean Fabre (around
1588-1658), in The Christian Alchimist , relates baptism and the operations of calcination
and washing, confirmation and fixation, the Eucharist and the philosopher's stone, penance
and the operations of calcination , putrefaction and dissolution, marriage and the
conjunction of the sun and the moon.

2. Chrismation is the equivalent in the Greek Orthodox Church of Confirmation in the

Roman Catholic Church. In the first, it is practiced immediately after baptism.

3. Homily on John 85, 3 (PG 59, 463).

4. Jn 15, 4-5.

5. In the Our Father, a request seems banal: “Give us this day our daily bread. Whoever
relates to the Greek originals of Luke and Matthew discovers their depths. Admittedly,
what is generally translated by “daily bread” or “daily bread” is a concrete bread, the bread
necessary for any meal of the Palestinian peasant. But the Palestinian commentaries teach
us that this bread is the figure of the manna that the Hebrews collected in the desert (Ex
16). On the sixth day, the Israelites, in order to keep the Sabbath, were called to gather their
share of the manna for two days, for today and for tomorrow. Also, this request for bread is
not only the daily food that our bodies crave, but also the manna. The Sabbath, implicitly
evoked by the word “of this day” (daily), is not the last day of successive weeks, but the last
Sabbath which comes to close the history of the world. "Give us today" means that we must
ask today for the end-time bread. So the early Christians took communion at every meeting.
They would persevere in sharing in the breaking of the bread (Ac 2, 42). The frequency of
the meetings becoming daily involved the daily communion with the “daily bread”. From
the third century, texts show that communion, contact with the Body of Christ, was daily.
From the 5th to the 8th centuries , we see a decline in practice, partly as a result of particular
severity. Married lay people had to abstain for three nights before receiving the sacrament.
Over the centuries, the Christian came to wonder if he was worthy of communion. Despite
the reminder of many mystics, the Eucharist, originally understood as a remedy, had been
transformed into a reward. The Fathers translated the teaching of the origins when, in their
paintings and in their writings, they represented the Eucharist in the form of milk. Milk is
the natural food adapting itself to the age of the child, to maintain in him the life and to
make him arrive at the age of the man.

6. Mt 26, 26-27.
 7. Lk 22, 19.

8. This ritual recitation of the gestures and words of Christ is called “anamnesis”. In Plato,
anamnesis ( anamnesis) is the activity of the mind that leads us from the sensible world,
subject to time, to the eternal world of Being.

9. Ap 5, 6-14.

10. Heb 6, 19-20. Paul affirms that Christ, at the time of his ascension, ascended into
heaven to be the supreme pontiff there. He entered the heavenly sanctuary as the high
priest of the Jews on the Day of Atonement, bringing his own blood to intercede for the
multitude of men.

11. Rev 13, 8.

12. Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Discourse , 37.

13. Cat. Gold, XXXVI, 2, Méridier, p. 172.

14. Dare I say, with Father Guy Gilbert, that the Eucharist consists in making Love
descend into my bare hands?

15. Nicolas Cabasilas, Life in Christ , IV, 37.

16. Jn 6, 5-6.

17. Bickel, S. Isaac Antiocheni , II, p. 32.

18. Fanqîth, sixth volume (Pars Aestiva prior), p. 337 a.

19. Gregory of Nyssa, In bapt. Christi , PG 46, 581 B.

 WHEN THE SPEECH CATCHES FIRE
 

He asked her: “ Do you understand what you are reading? »

“ And how could I, ” he said, “if no one guides me? »

ACTS 8, 30-31
 Scripture study
 

The Bible behaves like a leaven. But simply reading it is insufficient. We are missing keys.
The text itself warns us of this. Philip pursues a chariot at the request of God and his Spirit:

“The Angel of the Lord addressed himself to Philip and said to him: “Leave and go away,
at noon, on the road which descends from Jerusalem to Gaza; it is deserted.” So he left and
went there. An Ethiopian, a eunuch, high official of Candace, queen of Ethiopia, and
superintendent of all her treasures, who had come on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was
returning, seated on his chariot, reading the prophet Isaiah. The Spirit said to Philip, “Come
on and overtake this chariot.” Philip ran there, and he heard that the eunuch was reading
the prophet Isaiah. He asked him: “Do you understand what you are reading? – “And how
could I, he said, if no one guides me? And he invited Philip to come up and sit beside him . »

This insufficiency of the literal meaning is easy to understand. The Word of God came
into the world clothed in flesh. If his flesh was open to all, within the reach of all who knew
him, his divinity was not. The clothing of the flesh veiled the body of light. The favor of
perceiving divinity was granted to a few, as in the episode of the Transfiguration. In the
knowledge of Christ offered to the apostles, we find two degrees, two planes, the first of
which covered the other. The same goes for the sacred text. Of the divine word we only
know the scripture. Without the signs with which it is clothed, we would not know this
word of God. These signs, the letter of Scripture, form the body of this word:

“This is how you must understand the Scriptures: as the unique and perfect body of the
Word 2 . »

A modest veil covers all authentic revelation. The study of the Scriptures includes the
deciphering of the text from the keys which open up its meaning. Some Fathers set them
out in their commentaries , following the previous rabbinical schools. God grants his gift to
those who patiently seek it where it hides: in his Word. In an interpretation of the
multiplication of the loaves 3 , Origen compares Scripture to those loaves that must be
broken to feed the faithful.

The literal meaning and the spiritual meaning

  

The Bible forbids us to consider its reading sufficient in itself. Eve didn't talk to a snake
and the world wasn't created in six times twenty-four hours. Historical headings are mixed
with stories belonging to the literary genre of mâschâl . The mâschâl is a comparison, an
analogy, a fable which is based on concrete data to communicate a lesson. The Hebrew
word mâschâl was translated into Greek by parabole , then into French by parabole . As
Claude Tresmontant reminds us, the authors of these texts were no more fooled by their
process than Jean de la Fontaine when he made wolves, foxes and lambs speak.

The literal, historical sense relates the raw fact; it is the body of Scripture , the one
revealed by the linguistic understanding of the exposition.

The same episode of the Bible can be read at multiple levels. Beyond the literal meaning,
ancient and medieval exegesis 4 distinguishes three degrees of reading; the allegorical
sense, the tropological sense and the anagogic sense. The definitive unveiling being
obtained only at the third degree.

The allegorical, typological sense is the soul of Scripture. He explains the events of the
Old Testament by the events of the life of Christ described in the New Testament.

The moral, tropological sense teaches how we should act. He looks in the text for figures,
vices or virtues, passions or stages that the human spirit must go through in its ascent to
God; he is the Spirit of Scripture.

These three senses are crowned by the anagogic degree; it is not a fourth sense strictly
speaking, but the transcendent principle of divinization, pure experience. It gives an idea of
the final realities that will become visible at the end of time. In the understanding of the
scriptures, celestial fire leads us from shadow to image and from image to eternal reality. It
is at this supreme degree that the most reserved knowledge is found. The secret knowledge
to which the teaching of Christ leads is given directly to the soul by God himself and not by
a human master.

Also, the Bible warns us against the fundamentalist reading 5 and the rationalist reading
that everything usually opposes, but which converge by sticking to the literal sense. The
Jewish scholar is warned by the Zohar 6 , which recalls earlier traditions:

“The literal meaning of Scripture is the envelope; and woe to him who takes this
envelope for Scripture itself! Such a man will have no part in the future world. This is why
David said: “Remove the veil that is over my eyes, that I may see the marvels that are
enclosed in your law. David wanted to see what is hidden under the envelope. Fools only
look at a man's clothing, and when it is beautiful, the one who wears it also appears to them
to be beautiful. Yet the garment takes on something more precious than itself, and that is
the body; and this hides something even more precious, and that is the soul. Scripture also
has a body, and these are the commandments; she also has a habit, and these are the tales;
and finally she has a soul that was revealed to those who were near Mount Sinai. It is the
soul of Scripture which constitutes the essential and fundamental part; and in future times
everyone will be able to see the soul of Scripture . »

The Greek Fathers took advantage of the Jewish masters 8 . They were encouraged by the
Gospels themselves. We see Jesus there affirming that the Old Testament announces Christ
in a veiled way 9 and applying what Moses and the prophets say:

“And, beginning with Moses and going through all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in
all the Scriptures what concerned him 10 … everything that is written about me in the Law of
Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled 11 . »

Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, recalls the story of Sarah, the free woman, and Hagar,
the servant, who both bore a son to Abraham 12 . He teaches that this is an allegory – he uses
the word – of the two covenants: that of Moses and that of Christ, that of the synagogue and
that of the Church, those of the two Jerusalems. The first alliance is servile and carnal, the
second free and spiritual.

The germination of the inner man

 

The Fathers insist on the need to read and reread the Scriptures in order to gather their
living marrow hidden under the bone of the words. But what reading is it? A disposition of
receptivity, welcome, openness, is necessary. Certainly, the book must be open before us;
but at the same moment our heart must be open. Because the book is written for us. Each
page of Scripture is a letter sent by God to his creature. We must acquire and maintain a
recipient mentality, knowing that these letters are addressed to us. We are the material of
the book; it tells our own story, from our genesis to our apocalypse. The Elders discovered -
directives guiding them in their journey. In the Old Testament, God commands Ezekiel to
eat the book, written on the outside and inside:

“I saw something like fire and a glow all around; the aspect of this glow, all around, was
like the aspect of the arc which appears in the clouds, on a rainy day. It was something like
the glory of Yavhé. I looked, and I fell face down; and I heard the voice of someone speaking
to me… “Open your mouth and eat what I am going to give you.” I looked, and behold, a
hand was stretched out towards me, holding a rolled up volume. He unfolded it in front of
me; it was written on the front and back 13 . »

This injunction to have to eat a book inside and out is to know a message that has an
invisible meaning. The prophets reinterpreted certain seminal events in Israel's history as
describing the future destiny of Israel, but also that of the human soul.

The study of the Scriptures involves meditation on the text, its rumination, its descent
into practical and daily life. This eating of the divine word can cause living water to well up
in the heart of those who seek God:

“Were not our hearts burning within us when he spoke to us on the way, when he
explained the scriptures to us ? »

The external word, read and meditated upon, arouses an echo in the inner man and
makes his sister resonate, the word which lies deep within each man. Let no one imagine
that this is specific to Christianity. At the beginning of our era, the Jew Philo of Alexandria 15
, relating the approach of a Jewish community, shows how it is necessary to pass from the
literal sense to the spiritual sense, in order to access an authentic spiritual experience:

“The explanations of the sacred texts are made according to the meaning hidden in the
allegories. For these men, indeed, the whole Code of Law is similar to an animal: its body
represents the commands expressed, its soul, the invisible meaning contained in the letter.
In this invisible sense, the rational soul begins to contemplate in a particular way the things
which are familiar to it, and notices the extraordinary beauties of the thoughts which are
reflected as in a mirror. By the explanation and the revelation which are brought to light in
the eyes of those who, with the little memory they have, can contemplate the invisible
things through the visible 16 . »

Scripture meditation is a gentle fire that germinates the inner man, our body of light. By
this interior man, this word, this Christ called to grow in us, we will spiritually read the
Holy Books. Let the Scriptures act as Mary does who

"keeps all these things carefully, pondering them in his heart . "

Insofar as it makes us collect, integrate all things, this study is a Marian exercise.
 Ratings
 

1. Ac 8, 26-31.

2. Origen, In I. , fragment, PG, t.13, col. 544 c.

3. Mt 14, 13-21.

4. Origen (185-254) was the first to formulate the doctrine of the four senses of Scripture
in the Christian tradition. These meanings of Scripture were used to interpret Scripture
during prayer, as Origen indicated in 238 in a letter in Greek to his disciple Gregory the
miracle-worker. He exhorts him to dedicate himself to the study of the Scriptures:
“Dedicate yourself to the reading of the divine Scriptures. Apply yourself to this with
perseverance… By thus devoting yourself to lectio divina , seek with righteousness and an
unshakeable trust in God the meaning of the divine Scriptures, which are contained therein
in abundance. Origen generally uses three meanings in his commentaries on Scripture:
historical, mystical, and anagogic, but he uses allegory extensively. Jean Cassien
systematized the four senses in the 5th century . He indicates, in his XIV th Conference (§ 8):
“The four figures will be united, so that the same Jerusalem will be able to take on four
different meanings: in the historical sense, it will be the city of the Hebrews; in the
allegorical sense, the Church of Christ; in the anagogical sense, the celestial city, “which is
our mother to all”; in the tropological sense, the human soul”.

5. Popes Leo XIII and Pius XII published encyclicals on biblical studies. Leo XIII, in
Providentissimus deus (1893), warns against an exclusively literal interpretation: rte which
ancient authors, are added some which are special to the interpretation of the Holy Books.
As they are the work of the Holy Spirit, words hide in them many truths which far surpass
the force and penetration of human reason, namely the divine mysteries and all that relates
to them. The meaning is sometimes more extensive and more veiled than the letter and the
rules of hermeneutics would seem to indicate; moreover, the literal meaning itself hides
other meanings which serve either to clarify dogmas or to give rules for life. Also, it cannot
be denied that the Holy Books are shrouded in a certain religious obscurity, so that no one
should approach their study without a guide. »

6. The Sepher ha‐Zohar or Book of Splendor is considered the major work of medieval
Jewish mysticism. It is a mystical commentary on many passages of the Torah. It presents
the text of the Torah as a description of the inner life of God and the dynamics of divine
forces. This treatise allowed the dissemination of the teachings specific to the Spanish
Kabbalah.

7. III, 149.
 8. The doctrine of the four senses is practiced in the Judaic tradition for the study of
Torah:

Pshat : literal;

Remez : allusive (literally: allusion);

Drash : allegorical (literally: to dig, to probe, to seek);

Sod (kabala) : mystical (literally: secret).

Whether the hermeneutics of the four senses of Scripture is a transmission from Judaism
to Christianity or a later influence of Christianity on Judaism is debated. Gershom Scholem,
one of the greatest specialists in the field, leans towards a Christian influence.

9. Lk 24, 13-32 and 44-46.

10. Lk 24, 27.

11. Lk 24, 44.

12. Gn, 16 and 21.

13. Eze 1, 27-28 and 2, 8-9.

14. Lk 24, 32.

15. Philo was born between 20 and 10 BCE. Born a Jew to a father who was perhaps the
first of the family to settle in Egypt, he belonged to a clan of high finance. Pro-Roman, he
was epistrategist of Syria in 41, procurator of Judea in 46 (ten years after Pontius Pilate),
prefect of Egypt from 66 to 69. He was second in command of the army of Titus besieging
Jerusalem in 70. In the Vita Contemplativa , he describes the community of Therapists.

16. From Vita Contemplativa , 78.

17. Lk 2, 19.
 PRAYER
 

For you, when you pray, retire to your room, close the door on yourself and pray to your
Father who is there, in secret...

MATTHEW 6, 6
 Prerequisites
 

The situation is paradoxical. In catechism, we were told repeatedly that we had to pray,
but no one taught us how to do it. The problem is not new, because

“we only know how to ask in order to pray properly what is needed 1 ”.

Let us seize the problem head-on, leaving aside the prayer of petition, the most attested
in Jesus. We will not concern ourselves with worship and liturgical prayer that involve the
community . All of these forms of prayer are legitimate under the New Testament, but their
purposes are beyond the scope of this discussion of perpetual prayer.

Words are deceiving

 

Let's explore the Fathers keeping in mind that the meaning attached to certain words
having worn out, we risk missing the message. Take the word “meditation”. "Meditation"
originally means "to repeat" and not "to ponder", to brood over thoughts or to write an
essay. In Latin as in Greek, “meditation” expresses the idea of an exercise. Originally , this
word was used to designate any kind of physical or intellectual exercise, any practice
intended to prepare oneself and to become more flexible. But later, the language rather
reserved exercisee for physical exercises and meditari for those of the mind. Meditation is
an exercise analogous to the rehearsals of soldiers and musicians. This exercise does not
consist of variations on a known theme, but of continual repetition with a view to perfect
execution.

Where to pray?
 

Where to pray? Certainly, Paul recommends:

 "So therefore I want men to pray everywhere 2 ..."

But knowing how to pray everywhere is more of an objective than a starting point. Let's
turn instead to the Gospel:

"For you, when you pray, retire to your room, close the door behind you and pray to your
Father who is there, in secret 3 ..."

The Greek term for “bedroom” designates the secluded room in the house, protected
against thieves, where no one enters. There, the one who prays is alone with God. The word
"chamber" can also be understood as the human heart. As much as possible, the prayer is
recited in complete darkness or with eyes closed, and not with eyes open before an icon
illuminated by a lamp.

Prayer: what for e 4 ?

 

The union of man with God and his deification are not the fruit of human will. Prayer is
not capable of producing the union of man with God, nor his deification, but it makes us fit
to receive it. Dionysius the Areopagite offers the image of the sailor who is in a boat. To
help him, a rope is thrown. By pulling on the rope, he does not pull the rock to him. He
himself approaches the rock with his boat. Denys exposes his teaching:

“Let us therefore strive by our prayers to raise ourselves to the summit of these divine
and beneficent rays, in the same way as, if we seize and constantly drag it towards us with
our two alternate hands an infinitely luminous chain which would hang from the top of the
sky and would come down to us, we would have the impression of attracting it downwards,
but in reality our effort could not move it, because it would be all together present above
and below, and that is we rather who would rise to the highest splendours of a perfectly -
luminous radiance . »

Thus, the one who is in prayer does not bring down God who is present everywhere, but
raises himself towards Him. Until reaching this state of pure prayer where man finds
himself at the same time as he finds God:

“When the noûs 6 , writes Evagrius, seeing the old man stripped naked, will have clothed
the man with grace, then he will see his own state at the time of prayer, similar to the color
of the sapphire or the sky, and that the Scripture calls the Place of God which was seen by
the Elders on Mount Sinai 7 . »

Whether he realizes it or ignores it, man moves in God and asphyxiates himself out of
God. This is why our contemporaries offer the tortured face of a life that has lost all
meaning. Prayer restores this “bond which unites creatures to their creator 8 » . Certainly,
such a link is already established by the reception of the sacraments: in particular baptism,
confirmation and the eucharist. They potentially restore to man the original splendor of the
image of God and restore him to his likeness. It is through prayer that he can establish a
personal relationship with God present in him, give his free assent to the transformation He
brings about, become a conscious and voluntary collaborator in the deification He brings
about.

Why establish such a link? To get fire to come down from Heaven 9 . There is no celestial
intervention on our earth that is not signed by fire. In the Covenant with Abraham, a
smoking oven and a brand of fire passed between the shared animals 10 » . Let us rap the
burning bush 11 , the pillar of fire 12 , the smoking Sinai 13 or the devouring flame 14 . When
Gideon asks for a first sign, he will receive an igneous sign: " Yahweh's angel stretched out
the end of the staff he had in his hand. He touched Gideon 's offering. and fire came up from
the stone and consumed the flesh and unleavened meat 15 » . Moreover, when he announced
the birth of Samson, to Manoah and his wife, " the angel of the Lord also ascended with the
flame of the altar 16 » . David called on the Lord who granted him with fire which he sent
down from the heavens on the altar of burnt offering 17 » . His son Solomon prayed at the
dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem, and " fire came down from heaven and consumed the
burnt offering 18 » . Why so many holocausts, burnt victims, sacrifices before the cult became
interior? All these biblical acts have a deep meaning if we do not forget that we burn the
offerings to reintegrate everything by fire into the supernatural world. To make sacred is
the very meaning of the word “sacrifice”, derived from the Latin sacer and facere . All these
igneous sacrifices - from the first of Abel that " Yahweh looked on with benevolence 19 – are
only the heralding figures of the final transfiguration by fire : “ The fiery skies will dissolve ‐
and the fiery elements will melt to be replaced by “ New Heavens and a New Earth 20 » .

This light, God sends it and it goes away. He calls her and she obeys him trembling 21 . In
Scripture, God is a consuming fire . We see God answering prayer with a fire that burns and
consumes the burnt offering of Aaron 23 or the altar of Elijah, or else devours the schi matics
of Korah 24 , even twice the fifty men of Ahaziah 25 . The lightning will only electrocute the
two imprudent sons of Aaron, without, however, igniting their tunic, or the son of
Abinadab. The dazzling light of Glory renders itself harmless to Saul of Tarsus, merely
overthrows him and binds his senses in a three-day ecstasy. Finally, without blinding, God
can make himself known in a theophany that magnifies His Creation before our eyes.
  

How to do ?
 

Let's twist the blow to a frequent idea, according to which any form and any formula are
to be rejected. Of course, formalism is to be avoided and the objective remains prayer “in
spirit and in truth”. But spontaneous prayer, springing from the heart, without
contamination of our psychic states, is a high spiritual state. It is not appropriate to start
there.

How

“to make prayers which pray themselves in us and for us, and not those prayers which
we are obliged to support on all sides, drawing them from formulas or from childish and
scrupulous habits 26 ”?

The technique of prayer, in all its purity, has been reported to us by Cassian (360-445) in
the Instructions and Lectures . He knew that there is an art of prayer, which can be taught
and learned. Through Father Germain, he poses the problem:

“We believe that this divine art which teaches us to keep ourselves inseparably attached
to God, also has its principles and its foundations which must first be established and firmly
established… We believed that these foundations could be to have someone object and
some idea which fills our memory, and which serves us to conceive of God and to stand in
his presence and to seek, then, how we can fix ourselves in this idea. We believe, Father,
that everything is contained in these two principles. […] It is visible, he will observe again,
that “the presence of God escapes us”, “that our attention is relaxed and dissipated… that
we all fall into this disorder and this confusion because we do not have nothing that we
proposed as a fixed and immobile object, to which we could suddenly recall our mind after
this dissipation”. In response, the holy Abbot Isaac reveals the secret to him: “A secret left
to us, by tradition, by a very small number of the oldest of our Fathers, who were still living
in our time and which we also only told a little of people, who ardently desired it.” It is a
question of always having in the mouth and especially in the heart, the first verse of Psalm
69: “God, save me!” »

This is the constant teaching of Paul 27 . Father Isaac continues:

 “Get accustomed to saying this verse, to meditating on it constantly, whether you are
working with your hands or whether you are in your exercises or on a journey. Say it or
sing it continuously. Think about it even while sleeping, think about it while eating and
even in the lowest necessities of nature. This repetition will preserve you vera... will purify
you... to raise you to the contemplation of celestial and invisible things and to raise you,
little by little, to that ardent and ineffable prayer, which is known to so few people... That
sleep every day close your eyes to the consideration of these holy words, until your soul is
so possessed by them that it remembers them even during the night. »

"Prayer is the breath of our soul . " »

wrote Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin. Could we imagine a being who would remain alive
breathing only one hour per year, per month or per week?

insistence
 

According to Cassian, we obtain what we desire by importuning the divine who urges us
to hurry him by our violence 29 . The episode of Jacob wrestling with God until he blessed
him 30 reminds us of this 31 . No doubt it would be more accurate to write that we force the
passage, rather than God! The passion was given to the violent so that they could use it to
force the doors of the Kingdom. We are in the East, with Fathers who know that God is
Eastern and that Daniel prayed and insisted for twenty-one days before being answered 32 .

Let's say it again: God likes to be bothered. It is for him a proof of love and fidelity.
Reread Lk 11:5-9 in the light of insistent prayer!

“Even when we feel thwarted in our enterprise, or when our strength is slowing down,
we have the right to challenge with his own words the one who told us that he wanted to
found his Church on us; we have the right to remind him that his word cannot pass . »

A parable shows that the request is never unanswered, even if this answer is not the one
expected:

“And he told them a parable about how they should pray without ceasing and not be
discouraged. “There was a judge in a city who did not fear God and had no consideration for
anyone. There was also in this city a widow who came to him, saying: “Do me justice
against my adversary!” He refused for a long time. After which he said to himself: “I may
not fear God and have no consideration for anyone, nevertheless, as this widow bothers me,
I will do her justice, so that she does not come endlessly to break me. the head." And the
Lord said, “Listen to what this iniquitous judge says. And God would not do justice to his
chosen ones who cry out to him day and night, while he waits on them! I tell you that he
will do justice speedily 34 …”

short prayers
 

“The masters of the spiritual life, it is said in Cassian's Institutions , think that it is better
to make short prayers and repeat them more often. By multiplying these prayers, we will
attach ourselves more intimately to God, and, by making them short, we will better avoid
the arrows that the devil launches, especially then, against us 35 […]. Thus, he says again
elsewhere, we must pray short but frequent prayers, lest, if they were long, the enemy
would have time to throw some distractions into our hearts . »

According to these masters, brief prayer is more easily pure, because it is free from
distractions. To achieve union with God, they considered effective these rapid impulses that
start from the heart.

Go as high as you want, you will find Seth, Abel's replacement, who " was the first to call
on the name of Yahweh 37 » . Isaac did the same 38 . You will find the apostles, as Clement of
Alexandria, Cassian or John Chrysostom tell us, who recommends: say to yourselves : "Have
mercy on me, my God," and you've finished your prayer. » Augustine repeated « Deo Gratias »
and spoke of « frequent prayers but very brief and as quickly launched » (quodammodo
jaculatas) , which gave rise to the expression ejaculatory oration . Ignatius went on : O
Beata Trinitas » whereas François Xavier preferred « O Sanctissima Trinitas » . A wealthy
resident of Assisi invited Saint Francis to his house to spy on his prayers. He heard her
repeat fervently all night these words : My God and my Everything. " There is no need to
vary the invocations, because " trees that are often transplanted have no roots 39 » . A single
sentence of adoration is enough for the will to maintain the fire of love, without any mental
effort. On the contrary, the understanding will automatically come to the aid of the will if
the latter turns away for a moment from its God. As in all our mental exercises; from
language to writing, from calculation to music. The perfect gesture comes only after
oblivion, to the point that the one in whom it occurs is quite astonished. Prayer should
sound like simple, repeated childish babble rather than learned, convoluted speech.

 
 perpetual prayer
 

Perpetual prayer is not a machine for saying the same thing as many times as possible, in
the shortest time. It is a way to remain in God, in all serenity, without images and without
concepts, and to fight against distractions with the minimum of pain. It is mental prayer,
without sound of words, unknown until the time of Samuel 40 . It can be said mentally too
quickly; it is never said too slowly. The rhythm that suits each reciter must be found by
himself. It leads the Spirit, as if surprised, to hold all the senses in suspense because

“Prayer is not perfect if man is aware of himself and realizes that he is praying 41 ”.

At this level, prayer becomes a kind of mental whisper while the cutting edge of the soul
finds itself, at times, in the silence of God. Prayer translates into the sensation of a descent
of God into the depths of the soul, which the mystics locate in the chest, in the heart, and,
simultaneously, of a flight of the spirit which pierces the clouds to rest in the bosom of the
Father. In the practice of perpetual prayer , man is content with intellectual asceticism by
will. Only one thing is asked of him: to be a man of desire.

"And what is the faithful and wise monk, who has preserved this ardor without
extinguishing it and who, until the end of his life, does not cease to rekindle each day this
fire in the fire, this ardor in the ardour, this zeal in the zeal and this desire in the desire 42 ? »

His prayer must express his true will and not a whim of the moment. He must be capable
of perseverance, of liberation from multiple human slaveries: cigarettes or an obsessive
memory, the habit of daydreams or useless words, the temptations of anxiety about -
tomorrow: “ Hands at work, intellect with God » , recalls Théophane 43 . For the rest, it is God
who does everything: Prayer is God who does everything in everything 44 . When our mind
and heart are thus linked, God unites with us, the Name is drawn into the heart . God fills
man as his temple, transmutes him, christifies him. He prays within him in a way
impossible to describe. This is Paul's experience : In proof that you are sons, God has sent the
Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying out Abba, Father 45 . Or again: “ It is no longer me, it is
Christ who lives in me 46 . »

The Fathers prayed standing, hands stretched towards the sky in the classic attitude of
the praying man of Mediterranean civilizations. With pragmatism, Richard Rolle observes
that
 "the high love of Christ is revealed in three ways: by warmth, gentleness and song, and I
am convinced that these three cannot last too long without a great rest being observed... so
I have chosen to be seated for contemplation. I know very well why: if a man stands or
walks for a while, his body gets tired and his soul becomes troubled and strains under the
load in some way; and he is not in high stillness, departing in perfection”.

Later, the monks will not be afraid to pray sitting down, even lying down like the
Carthusians. Which has an advantage. Francisco de Osuna (1497-1542), who revealed
Teresa of Avila to herself, teaches us. In his Tercer Abecedario , published in Toledo in 1527,
he discusses the links between prayer and sleep:

“ It is certain and well experienced by those who devote themselves to the prayer of
recollection that the more they have prayed before sleep, the more quickly they return to it
when they wake up. And even something that is hard to believe happens: before waking up
the soul returns to prayer, sometimes it happens that it is up to it to wake up or not, and
this because beginning to wake up internally is very different from wake up externally.
Then the soul is in itself like the living water under the layer of ice or like the chicken which
lives in the egg before having broken the shell or like the prophet Jonah who was in the
belly of the whale and from there could pray to the Lord. »

“I sleep, but my heart is awake 47 ! Perpetual prayer was transmitted in the Russias and
popularized by the Tales of a Russian Pilgrim . The text appeared for the first time in Kazan,
around 1870, then in 1881. After the revolution of 1917, the Stories were printed in Paris,
in 1930. of Optimo, this solitude frequented, in turn, by Gogol, Dostoievski, Soloviev,
Tolstoy and many others. To guide himself, our pilgrim has only two books: the Bible and
the Philocalia , this collection of texts that go back to the Fathers of the Desert, to the monks
of Sinai and Mount Athos. The pilgrim, a peasant, receives from his spiritual father the
prayer : Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me 48 , to be repeated several thousand times a day.
He gets to work. The prayer soon passed "into his heart" and he only had to count its beats
to verify the number.

This prayer is not only Eastern or Slavic. Practicing continual prayer, Richard Rolle
(1290-1349) explains to us that after three years, less three or four months, the gates of
heaven opened for him:

“I was sitting in a chapel and while I was enchanted by the sweetness of prayer, I
suddenly felt a joyful and unknown warmth. But first I was troubled wondering for a long
time what it could be. I was sure it was not from a creature, but from my Creator, because it
was getting warmer and happier. “In truth, half a year, three months and a few weeks
passed in this fragrant, sensitive and unexpected heat until I received the celestial and
supernatural sound, which belongs to the song of perpetual prayer and the sweetness of
the unknown melody, for it can only be known or heard by him who, being purified and
detached from the earth, can receive it. […] As I sat in this same chapel, in the evening
before supper, I sang as many psalms as I could. I heard above my head like the noise of
people who would read or rather sing. I continued to pray to heaven with an ardent desire
and suddenly, somehow, I felt the sound of the song within me and received a melody
which seemed heavenly and which remained within me in my spirit. For, from then on, my
thought was changed into a continual song of praise. I had these praises in my meditation
reciting my prayers and psalms, I whispered the same sound. Since then in an abundance of
dance of interior sweetness I burst out singing what before I recited but only in private,
when I found myself alone with my Creator. »

Prayer, psalms and chapel meet the three conditions for success that constitute the
ternary: prayer, reading and rite. The hermit of Hampole seems to have been led, by an
illumination, to perpetual prayer, although he already practiced the "prayer in the Name of
Jesus 49 ":

"I think no man can receive [such grace] unless he particularly loves the Name of Jesus
and honors it so much that he never lets it go from his mind except when he is sleeping. I
am convinced that whoever it is given to do this will arrive at the same result. »

He sums up his mystical experience in the formula : Calor, Dulcor, Canor translating the
phenomena aroused by perpetual prayer: Fire, Sweetness and the Songs of Angels » which
capture the supernatural origin of Gregorian and Byzantine chants.

At the same time, in the 14th century, appeared Le Nuage d'Inconnaissance , an

anonymous text. The prayer is summed up in a single syllable: "God", "Fault", "Fire"
launched with force through the cloud of unknowing which separates us from heaven. " The
prayer of the humble penetrates the clouds where God dwells 50 .
 Ratings
 

1. Rom 8, 26.

2. 1 Tim 2.8.

3. Mt 6, 6.

4. In this chapter, I will often refer to the works of Jean G. Bardet cited in the
bibliography.

5. The Divine Names III, 1.

6. Spirit, reason, intellect. Thus, in the philosophy of Anaxagoras and Aristotle, the nous is
an organizing principle of the universe.

7. Prakticos I, 71 PG, t. XL, col. 1244 a.

8. Grégoire Palamas, Three Chapters , 1.

9. From Moses saved from the waters to the baptism of Christ, the receptacle is marked
by water.

10. Gen 15, 17.

11. Ex 3, 2.

12. Ex 13, 21.

13. Ex 19, 18.

14. Ex 24, 17.

15. Jg 6, 21.

16. Jg 13, 15-23.

17. 1 Ch 21, 26.

18. 2 Ch 7, 1.

19. Gen 4.

20. 2 Pet 3, 12-13.

 21. Ba 3, 3.

22. Dt 4, 24; Ml 3, 23; Heb 12, 29; Rev 21, 27.

23. Num 11, 1-3.

24. Numbers 16, 35.

25. 2 Kings 1, 9 et seq.

26. "Prayer", in Posthumous works , Tours, Létourmy, 1807.

27. Ep 6, 18; Col 1, 3; Col 4, 2; 1 th 5, 17; 2 th 3, 10; 1 Tim 5.5; 2 Tim 1.3; etc

28. Thoughts from a Manuscript of M. St. Martin , Posthumous Works , Tours, Létourmy,
1807.

29. This legitimacy to violate God is reinforced by his own promises and demands that he
cannot deny; Mt 20, 14; Lk 14, 23; Gn, 24 and Mt 18, 21; Is 62, 8; Ex 20.7.

30. Gen 32, 27.

31. Jerome and Origen interpreted this story as a picture of spiritual warfare and the
effectiveness of insistent prayer.

32. Dn 10, 1.

33. Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, The Man of Desire , Lyon, 1790.

34. Lk 18, 1-8.

35. Institutions II, 10.

36. Coll. IX, ch. 36.

37. Gen 4, 26.

38. Gen 26, 25.

39. Gregory the Sinaite, On Tranquility and Prayer , 2.

40. 1S 1, 12.

41. Cassian, Lectures. ; IX, 31.

42. Jean Climaque, quoted by Florovsky, Georges, in The Byzantine fathers of the 5th in the
eighth centuries , Institute of Orthodox Theology Saint-Serge, Paris, 1997.
 43. Beginners engage in simple exercises. The more they progress, the more they seek
sophisticated practices. In this attitude, pride creeps in. When the musician becomes
intimate with God, the simplest scales turn out to be rich and sufficient.

44. Gregory the Sinaite, Chapters , 113.

45. Gal 4, 6.

46 . Gal 2, 21.

47. King 5, 2.

48. Lk 18, 13 and 18, 38.

49. The Roman Church has a feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. Since Pius X, this feast has
been celebrated on the Sunday between January 1 and Epiphany or, failing that, January 2.
The mass and the office of the feast were composed by Bernardin dei Busti (+ 1500) and
approved by Pope Sixtus IV. Originally confined to Franciscan convents, the feast was later
extended to the whole Church. We also know with what devotion the IHS monogram was
surrounded. This does not mean, as is often said : Jesus Hominum Salvator , but simply
represents an abbreviation of the name of Jesus. The great propagator of devotion to the
name of Jesus during the late Middle Ages was Bernardin of Siena (1380-1444). He
recommended carrying tablets that had the IHS sign on them. But it was Bernard de
Clairveaux, in the twelfth century , that the name of Jesus inspired the most. Let us read his
Sermon XV on the Song of Songs . Likening the name of Jesus to the spilled oil evoked by the
Song , he develops the idea that the sacred Name, as well as the oil, enlightens, nourishes,
anoints.

50. If 35, 17.

 THE WAY OF THE HEART
 

Hope does not confuse, because the love of Elohim is poured into our hearts by the sacred
breath given to us 1 .

ROMANS 5, 5
 The place of the heart
 

The heart is the center of man. It is the site of violent conflagrations. All kinds of desires
compel us to do what we don't really want. Our heart is hidden in a whirlwind, in a cyclone
of passions. No one can reach it directly without being torn apart by the outer guardians.
But we can descend there from above, without the dragons on guard noticing our presence.
On Christmas night, the birth takes place from above, that is to say by a way which is not
guarded. We must learn to descend into the heart, to gradually penetrate what separates us
from God.

When we think, we are mentally conversing with ourselves, under our skull 2 . The man of
the past considered the heart, and not the brain, as the seat of thought. The interior words,
received in the chest, at the height of the heart, are the most intimate and supernatural. But
it is a question of the heart taken as the center of the chest, not of the organ. The man was
aware of thoughts that touched the diaphragm or the bowels.

In the Bible, mercy is expressed by the emphatic plural of rehem , which means "womb".
To find one's heart in one's womb, according to an expression that recurs in the psalms, is
to awaken compassion towards one's neighbour. Regeneration consists of softening, then
undoing what keeps the divine heart prisoner. Then can open a sky larger than the
universe because transcendence fills it with its radiance:

“The spiritual land of the purified-souled man is within him. The sun which shines in him
is the light of The Trinity… He marvels at the beauty he sees in him, a hundred times more
luminous than the solar splendour. This is the Kingdom of God hidden within us, according
to the word of the Lord . The heart is the "body in the depths of the body " , that is to say the
germ of the body of glory: "Leaning your beard against your chest, direct the eye of the
body at the same time as your spirit on the center of your belly, that is to say on your navel,
compress the aspiration of air which passes through the nose […] and mentally scans the
interior of your entrails in search of the place of the heart, there where all the powers of the
soul love to gather. […] As soon as the spirit has found the place of the heart, it sees the
firmament which is there 5 …”

The formula of invocation most used in this process is “ Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have
mercy on me, a sinner ”, in the sense of “take me into your merciful presence”. This formula
can be, as the Russian Pilgrim explained in the last century 6 , synchronized with the
inspiration for “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God”, then with the expiration for “Have mercy on
me, a sinner”. This synchronization is placed at the service of another, more fundamental
one, which concerns the rhythm of the heart. Each word of the prayer being spoken on a
heartbeat.

Little by little the prayer becomes spontaneous, uninterrupted, and the heart, which at
first trembles furtively under touches of fire of an extreme sweetness, is set on fire,
becomes light. The invocation is identified with the beating of the heart without being
pronounced. The act of prayer is followed by a state of prayer:

“When the Spirit makes his home in a man, he cannot stop praying, the Spirit does not
stop praying in him. Whether he sleeps or watches, prayer is not separated from his soul.
While he drinks, eats, lies down, devotes himself to work, the perfume of prayer is exhaled
from his soul. Henceforth he no longer prays at specific times, but at all times. The
movements of the purified intelligence are mute voices which secretly sing a psalmody to
the invisible 7 . »

heat and fire

 

The natural state of our heart is to be on fire. Now, in the current man, asleep or "fallen",
but who considers himself normal, the heart does not burn. The fire smolders peacefully
under the ashes. The friction that occurs in everyday life is not intense enough to bring out
an inner fire capable of transfiguring the being, which would allow him to overcome death.
But it is more than enough to exhaust the reserve of vital forces and lead to death.

However, the heart must burn, and therefore ignite. Effective heat arises in us when the
internal friction becomes sufficiently intense. It happens like the heat that arises from the
friction of two pieces of dry wood. Experiencing this heat indicates that we are on the right
path. Its sweetness does not involve satiety. This warmth can be favored by circumstances,
as when the disciple, confronted with a hostile environment, is in constant search of the
right attitude. But this warmth can above all be provoked by prayer. The rubbing then
comes in the midst of the conscious confrontation between the heavenly and earthly fires.
The strength of prayer depends on the intensity of the feeling that arises from this
opposition, experienced thanks to the dualistic character of our emotional center. Pride,
even traces of pride, renders this confrontation inoperative:

“God resists the proud, but he gives his grace to the humble 8 […]. For whoever exalts
himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted . »

 
 For the process to work, man must be animated by desire, an earthly fire that springs
from his entrails. It must be moved by the greatest ardor (from the Latin ardere , to burn, to
be on fire), by the most vibrant enthusiasm (from the Greek entheos , animated by a divine
transport, then from the Latin entheus , inspired by a divinity), by the sting of desire, by a
divine eroticism. He must be, to use the expression of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, a “Man
of Desire”. There resound the words of the Apocalypse :

“I know your conduct: you are neither cold nor hot – what are you one or the other! –
thus, since you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I am going to vomit you out of my
mouth 10 . »

The heart ignites by itself when the friction releases a sufficiently strong heat, as in the
case of the two pieces of dry wood. It is a mystical fire. From there it spreads through the
veins. Boris Mouravieff recalls this traditional maxim: “When fire is kindled in the blood,
the very composition of the nervous system changes into essence. And the blood turns blue
11 .

The end of things

 

As soon as perpetual prayer has become as natural as breathing, man can walk, without
much difficulty, in the presence of God like Abraham 12 . And if he thus walks with God,
always putting himself before his Face, he will be “taken” like Enoch 13 or Elijah 14 . So

“…will be fulfilled the word which is written: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory.
Where is it, O death, your victory? Where is it, O death, your sting?” 15 ”.
 Ratings
 

1. I am using André Chouraqui's translation here.

2. Hippocrates was the first to attribute voluntary and sensitive intellectual functions to
the brain. Plato codified the function, we would say psychological, of the heart. In the
Timaeus , 70b, Plato speaks of the heart and the lungs as "capable of cooling the heart when
the heart [the irascible soul] grows hot". Why was the upper chamber of the heart called
the auricle? Whereas precisely, the atrial systole is silent on auscultation?

3. Isaac the Syrian, op. cit ., 43rd treaty , p. 177.

4. Grégoire Palamas, quoted by Jean Meyendorff, Introduction to the study of Grégoire

Palamas , Paris, 1959, p. 247.

5. Little Philokalia of the Prayer of the Heart , tr. and int. by J. Gouillard, Books of life n°
83-84, p. 161.

6. Tales of a Russian Pilgrim , tr. fr., Paris, 1975.

7. Little Philokalia of the Prayer of the Heart , tr. and int. by J. Gouillard, Books of Life nos .
83-84 , p. 82.

8. James 4.6 and IP 5.5.

9. Lk 14, 11.

10. 3, 15-16.

11. The traditional interpretation of "blue blood" relates to the transforming power of
the Holy Spirit descending into the blood of those who make themselves worthy to receive
it, as for example in knightly knighthood, priestly anointing or sacred.

12. Gen 17, 1.

13. Gen 5, 24; Si 44.16 and He 11.5.

14. 2 R 2, 11 and Si 48, 9.

15. 1 Cor 15, 54-55.

 BLOOD MEMORY
 

Yes, the life of the flesh is in the blood...

For the life of all flesh is its blood.

LEVITICUS 17, 11 AND 17, 14

 The whole man is renewed
 

Bible and Christianity repeat it; body and soul are one. Our body is deified together with
our soul. From this follows the medieval definition: “The soul is the form – the structuring
matrix – of the body. When celestial fire works to deify the human being, something
tangible happens. The body is changing. The whole man is renewed. Grégoire Palamas
confirms:

"If in future times the body is called upon to share with the soul unspeakable bliss, it is
certain that it must, as far as possible, from now on, have its share of it 1 . »

Sure enough, something is happening. The reader informed of the hagiography (but who
still reads the lives of the saints?) notes the various phenomena observed, during their
lifetime and after their death, on the organism of many religious, most often canonized in
consideration of these signs: luminosity and contributions in inexplicable substance,
exhalations of perfumes, powerful therapeutic virtue causing miraculous cures.

The body must follow

 

In the process of divinization, the body must follow. Thus, even brain activity, without
which it is impossible to achieve certain spiritual knowledge, is dependent on the body.
Exceptional spiritual states, to which the mind is not adapted, can cause temporary or
permanent damage in the cerebral domain. In the latter case, the content breaks its vessel,
which confirms the importance of the physical foundation in the practice of a spiritual art.

It is here that the junction is made between Christianity and alchemy , heir to natural
revelation . The practice of alchemy spread in a restricted environment, essentially
monastic. In the 13th century, alchemy was practiced not as research – in the current sense of
the term – but as a proven technique, with positive and regular results. All the orders
participated in it to varying degrees; Templars, Benedictines, Carthusians, Dominicans,
Franciscans. When modern religious orders were formed, such as the Society of Jesus, or
the Capuchins called Minimes 2 , in the 17th century, the same thing happened . The list of
religious who have practiced alchemy is almost endless. The father of post-Renaissance
Western alchemy, Paracelsus (1493-1541), named his first masters, including four bishops
and an abbot. With the advent of Protestantism, during the destruction of the convents, the
rebels found provisions of philosopher's stone in wall hiding places in the 16th , 17th and
even still in the 18th century .

The monks did not limit themselves to the production of digestive liqueurs! The
alchemical medicines sought in the monastic environment constituted an adjuvant to the
redemption of the body, intimately linked to the salvation of the soul. Spiritual asceticism
was supported by the intake of alchemical substances. In order for the body to follow 3 ...

In the West, the description of this process and of the techniques that favor it has become
the arcane of mysteries, the ultimate secret of the rare valid initiatory lineages 4 . More or
less adroitly, the doctrine of deification forms the framework of the works of Jacob
Boehme, the alchemical texts of the Rosicrucian tradition, the Christian theosophists of the
18th century and some contemporaries, such as Father Robert Amadou:

“The initiate reintegrates, and better, while his body of glory is built by the liturgy,
assisted by magic and alchemy, according to astrological protocol. Each day of this life, his
inner man is renewed: sown psychically, he is transfigured spiritually, while his soul is
embodied. The body is not the flesh and the resurrection is that of the whole dead. The
initiate now receives the deposit of the future life. He likewise transmutes the matter of the
world 5 . »

From bodily substances to blood

 

Of the substances of the body, we have evoked tears. We could also include saliva which
changes in nature and consistency under the effect of prayer and the Eucharist. The
episode recounted by Mark 6 reflects a physical reality understood by those who
experienced it. Of the substances of the body of Christ which came into contact with the
earth, let us not forget His

"sweat [which] became like big drops of blood that fell to the ground 7 ".

As for the blood 8 , it is the lamp of life, the support of the soul. Man, murderer or
sacrificer, sheds blood. The symbolism of blood is due to its consistency. It is liquid like
water. To its taste, because it is salty like the sea. It is due to its color and its heat, because it
is red and hot like fire. It is reminiscent of the primordial ocean incubated by the Spirit, the
bird of fire 9 . In biblical symbolism interpreted by alchemy, the blood is the Red Sea. You
have to cross it to get out of Egypt, that is to say, to escape the slavery of the corruptibility
of the body:

"Blood is the sword of the whirling flame that bars the way to the Tree of Life 10 . »

As a result of the fall of Adam and Eve, a primordial celestial substance became
imprisoned in human blood. In its place was established a ferment of corruption named
“gluten” by Eckhartshausen 11 .

Christ sheds life-giving blood for his murderers, that is, all of us. Pneumatized water of
baptism, pneumatized blood of the eucharist which is “Spirit and Fire” say the Syriac
liturgical texts. A soldier pierced his side with his lance and out came blood and water, of
which the earth was the mysterious receptacle, a veritable cosmic Grail. From the bosom of
Christ, water and blood flowed. This water and this blood possess the power of the first
moment of Creation. They are not contaminated by the fall. In this sense, the Quest for the
Grail is the quest for divine blood; it can ensure immortality and restore the primordial
state. Which amounts to purifying the human soul, conveyed by the blood, of its ferment of
corruption. In a way, the alchemical work can be reduced to a transmutation of the blood.

The work of regeneration

 

Regeneration is a rebirth, a new transfiguration. This restoration depends on how we

erase what darkens our nature and keeps us away from our origin. Man is like a
concentrated fire enclosed in a coarse envelope. He is separated from the primordial fire to
which he aspires to unite. This fire will burn the envelope that covers us. It will consume
what is impure, modify the body, make it receptive to God, restoring its royal dignity. With
the water and the blood, the Spirit is the craftsman of this deification:

“It is he who came by water and by blood: Jesus Christ, not with water only, but with
water and with blood. And it's the Spirit that bears record, because the Spirit is the Truth.
There are thus three to testify: the Spirit, the water, the blood, and these three tend to the
same end 12 . »

Spirit, water and blood form the transmuting agent, the philosopher's stone of Christian
alchemists:
 “I myself am metal, the Spirit is fire and furnace, the Messiah the tincture, which halos
body and soul 13 . »

This agent can act on our own blood and renew it, restore it:

“On the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus, standing up, cried out: If anyone is
thirsty, let him come to me and drink! Whoever believes in me, as the scripture has said,
rivers of living water will flow from his belly . »

Henceforth the divine-human blood mixes with ours. Our blood and our flesh will
eventually be transformed into divine substance:

“For this corruptible must put on incorruption, this mortal must put on immortality . »

Angelus Silesius echoes:

“God is my spirit, my blood, my flesh and my bones. How could I not be with Him deified
through and through 16 ? »

Our father in heavens

 

We experience it every moment; the freedom of each is bound up with the freedom of all.
No one can disregard the concrete human environment which conditions his own freedom.

The determination of the situation of every man by that of others is universal and
permanent. This solidarity is an insurmountable situation , despite the efforts of men to
extricate themselves from it. This determination is given from the beginning. In the form of
a mythical story, the episode of the fall of Adam tells why the world is what it is, why it does
not appear to us as it came, totally good, from the hands of God. This is what is called –
awkwardly – “original sin”.

One aspect of this determination of each man by the first ancestor is our biological
baggage. I am – physically and psychically – determined by the generations that preceded
me. The process of divinization leads us to change filiation. Every cell in our body must
cease to be the product of the genetic heritage of our parents and of an ancestral line dating
back a few million years. As James and John followed Jesus leaving their father in the boat,
we must exchange our horizontal filiation for a vertical filiation:

“And, advancing little by little, he saw James, son of Zebedee, and John his brother, they
also in their boat arranging their nets; and immediately he called them. And leaving their
father Zébédée in the boat with his employees, they left after him 17 . »

For every fiber of our flesh, God must become

“Our Father who art in heaven ! ".

And when we address Him by naming Him “Our Father”, it must be an observation, not a
wishful thinking:

"Call no one 'Father' on earth: for you have only one, the heavenly Father . " […] Follow
me, and let the dead bury their dead . »
 Ratings
 

1. Lk 24, 39-40.

2. The practice of alchemy was most widespread in the oldest religious orders. It seems
to have been preserved later among the Franciscans. We also find traces of practice among
the Dominicans.

3. “[…] This experimental awareness, although present in the minds of the

contemplatives of this period [the thirteenth century ], before the degeneration of spiritual life
from the sixteenth century , characterized by the term devotio moderna , that is to say
mystical, in the current sense of the term, this spiritual experimentation can only be fully
operated after a psychic and partly bodily regeneration following the absorption of
universal medicine. Without this support, the spiritual is, on pain of almost fatal and very
dangerous deviations for him, obliged to systematically reject the phenomenological
content of his spiritual experiences , and to disregard the natural knowledge thus acquired
[…] . (Preface by B. Husson to Le grand et le petit Albert , Paris, 1970).

4. From the Renaissance to the French Revolution, this approach was preserved by the
hermetic tradition in general, and by the Rosicrucian lineages in particular. By “hermetic
tradition” and “Rosicrucian lineages”, I mean “private teachings which have been
communicated from father to son (in certain aristocratic families) or from master to
disciple”. And not this or that contemporary organization that claims to be “hermetic” or
“Rosicrucian”.

5. Robert Amadou, De la Sainte Science , IV, 1.

6. Mk 7, 33.

7. Lk 22, 44.

8. To know more, we have to resort to the experience of Christian theosophists like

Paracelsus (1493-1541), Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), Johann Georg Gichtel (1628-1710),
Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702-1782 ), Angelus Silesius (1624-1677), Karl von
Eckhartshausen (1752-1803) and some contemporaries, such as OV by L. Milosz (1877-
1939).

9. Gn 1, 2.

10. Hippolytus, Philosophoumena , VI, 17.

 11. In the second part of this book (documents for the study), the reader will find a
synthesis relating to the work of this author La Nuée sur le sanctuary .

12. 1 Jn 5, 6-8.

13. Angelus Silesius, The Cherubic Pilgrim , (1, 103).

14. Jn 7, 37-38.

15. 1 Cor 15, 53.

16. Angelus Silesius, The Cherubic Pilgrim , (1, 216).

17. Mk 1, 19-20.

18. Mt 6, 9.

19. Mt 23, 9.

20. Mt 8, 21-22.
 CAN BLOOD OVERCOME DEATH?
 

For us, our city is in heaven, from where we eagerly await, as Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ,
who will transfigure our body of misery to conform it to his body of glory...

PHILIPPIANS 3, 21
 Divine blood, universal antidote
 

According to OV by L. Milosz, “ the whole universe runs in you ” (Memoria) . It recalls the
presence in the blood of a primordial substance, illuminator of consciousness and universal
antidote at the same time:

“Ask, my dear child, this blood which, from the consistency and the color, appears to you
of such a celestial substance! »

He confirms in the Song of Knowledge :

“I learned that the body of man contains in its depths a remedy for all ills and that the
knowledge of gold is also that of light and blood. »

This remedy is of the same nature as the blood of Christ and we only have the remains of
it. He is the blood of blood, the essence of blood.

Thanks to this essence, the total consciousness is contained in the blood. The role of the
brain would not be to elaborate this consciousness, but to inhibit it and sift it so that it does
not blind us. If we had access to it, we would no longer be able to select its useful aspects
for practical life and we would find ourselves frozen in contemplation. Milosz develops this
idea:

“Your heart is an anatomical sun, propelling your blood microcosm. And if the brain… is…
hermetic moon, it is not only by color analogy. […] The brain is only the satellite of the
heart. It only receives, filters, and restores the light of affirmation sent to it by the heart in
its spiritual radiation. […] Moon and brain are receivers and orderers of light. They
humanize the superhuman, make the blinding god accessible to our fragile eyes. ( Ars
Magna 1. )

The consciousness of the blood of Christ contains all the power of the first moment of
Creation. Through prayer, it is revealed little by little. If man is in this place – in this state –
where he acquiesces to the divine will, this consciousness restores our body and our soul:
 "Our blood perpetuates the moment of the first emission, and all the consciousness of the
spiritual propellant is still in it, always ready to reveal itself progressively to the
intelligences which, with the magic weapon of prayer, have reconquered the absolute place
of assertion. »

At this point, space loses its extension to resolve itself into movement alone. Time
refocuses in instantaneity. The blood is where this takes place. As biblical anthropology
affirms, blood is the junction point between the two worlds.

“All the cosmic blood is still in the momentum of the first ejaculation; initial mobile, it
teaches us to situate all things of space in motion alone, and all things of time in
instantaneousness alone. This is the secret of the old masters and the celestial origin of
their double concept of the unity of matter and the identity of the two worlds. »

The right gesture

 

It remains for us to situate ourselves below the movement of this blood. The blood
antidote corrupted by the fall will operate the transmutation. Man will recover total
consciousness, the sun of memory, prior to all corporeality.

"Transmutation once admitted as a fundamental principle , the progress of my work on

theirs had to be limited to a simple extension, for there remained for me, after Boehme,
Sendivogius and Paracelsus, only to identify matter with time and space, and, having thus
captured all three in movement, to chase movement itself from its place (which, as I have
recently learned and reveal here, is blood), to to make everything fall back into the
immobile instantaneousness of the sun of memory. »

In Memoria , the same author recalls the nature of the transmuting agent; it is the blood
which, behind appearances, conveys the body and blood of Christ, the bread and wine of
the Last Supper. This blood

"will reveal to you, finally, the secret of universal transmutation, for he is the Alchemist
who, under the ruby robe, hides the bread and wine of the Last Supper".

 
 But as the dedication of the Song of Knowledge warns :

“I address myself only to minds who have recognized prayer as the first among all the
duties of man. »

We don't play with these things and there is no secular chemistry. Imagining that we can
rise to the sky by pulling ourselves by the hair leads to shipwreck. Multiplying trainings -
and exercises without placing them in a spiritual perspective is fruitless at best . At death,
all is lost. The autism of internal alchemy leads to failure because

“any predisposition to intellectual creation not supported by prayer ends up repudiating

the procreative act”. (Memory.)
 Ratings
 

1. Unless otherwise stated, the following quotations from this chapter are taken from this
text.
 AND MAY THE MORNING STAR RISE IN
YOUR HEARTS
 

My little children, you whom I give birth to again in pain until Christ is formed in you.

GALATIANS 4, 19
 soul pregnancy
 

The deification is accomplished in several stages illustrated by palaces, residences,

valleys, metals, locations of the body. The Fathers compare this slow transformation to the
search for the Promised Land or to the ascent of Moses to Sinai. The most appropriate
image, because it is directly borrowed from the New Testament, is that of the inner child.
When Nicodemus questions him, Jesus replies:

"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except he be born from above, no man can see the
kingdom of God . " »

At the dawn of Christianity, we rediscover the divine breath. Like the light springing in
the primordial chaos, the Spirit permeates the bosom of the Virgin to take consistency
there. When Christ has reached his perfect size and ascended to the Father, he sends the
light of the Spirit. This takes form in the Christian so that the image of God is fully restored
there in his likeness.

Nicolas Cabasilas compares the present life to the " life in darkness and night that the
embryo knows in the maternal womb, preparing for its birth:

"For as nature prepares the embryo, while it is in a dark and nocturnal life, for life in the
light - and it is fashioned as after the pattern of the life to be received - so is- he of the saints
[...]. This world gives birth in pain to the entire new interior man, the one who was created
by God, and this one, shaped and shaped here below, is given birth perfect for a perfect and
eternally young world…”

It all ends in a new birth. What the apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians:

“My little children, you whom I give birth to again in pain, until Christ is formed in you 2 .
»

For Origen, there is in the body a spermatic Logos , a seminal reason which is the germ of
the risen one. He insists on the birth of Christ in each one, as in Mary, of this Christ who
grows in the soul of each one as he grew in Mary. Symeon the New Theologian teaches that
saints marry God and conceive the Logos in their wombs. About the fertilization of the
Virgin, he writes:
 “All the saints conceive in themselves the Logos of God almost as the Mother of God; they
engender him, he is engendered in them and they are engendered by him .

For the Fathers of the Church of the East, for Paracelsus and the Christian Theosophists
in the West, the true theology is that which deals with this new birth. Jesus teaches in
Nicodemus 4 :

“Unless one is born from above, no one can see the kingdom of God. »

Angelus Silesius 5 resumes:

“Would Christ have been born a thousand times in Bethlehem, and not in you, you remain
lost forever. […] I have to be Mary, and to give birth to God 6 ”.

Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin urges:

, strength and life ."

More recently, a page by René Schwaller de Lubicz ends with the birth, in the Virgin
Mother, of Christ who is the philosopher's stone of the West.

embryo of immortality 8
 

As Paul writes to the Colossians, Christianity is centered on this body of glory. The
apostle announces that this germ, called Christ , is in man. This germ left in the heart of man
must develop until it takes on the human creature. He must grow in glory to become
perfect, teleios in Greek, which is a technical term for the last grade of initiation. Paul is
therefore commissioned to reveal:

"The mystery hidden from ages and generations, [...] the richness of the glory of this
mystery is Christ in you, the hope of glory: it is he whom we proclaim, calling him to the
whole man , instructing the whole man in all wisdom, in order to make the whole man
perfect ( teleos ) in Christ .” 9
  

All the mystery is there: it is a question of the most concrete operation that there is, to
awaken this seed in us, to make it germinate until incorruptibility , until the body of glory.
God is essentially a germ, because he is love, self-diffusive. He never ceases to pour out
more and more, upwards. He is germ, pure germ. Germ, small seed, so small that it has no
limit, being unlimited like a point that wants to multiply without limit.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It
is indeed the smallest of all seeds, but when it has sprouted, it is the largest of vegetable
plants, which even becomes a tree, so much so that the birds of the sky come to shelter in
its branches 10 .”

In the Old Testament, the word “seed” is an image of the Messiah:

“The days are coming – declares Yahweh – when I will raise up a righteous seed for
David; a king will reign and will be intelligent, exercising justice and justice in the land .” 11

This word will become a proper name designating the Messiah:

"Behold, I am going to bring in my servant 'Berm 12 ', and I will remove the iniquity of this
land in one day 13 . […] Thus says Yahweh Sabaot. Here is a man whose name is Germ; where
he is, something will sprout 14 …”

The Messiah is also represented by a rising star. Thus, in the Old Testament:

“A star from Jacob becomes chief 15 […]. But for you who fear my name, the sun of justice
will shine, with healing under its wings . […] By the wombs of the help of our Elohim, he will
visit us, rising sun come from above, to appear to those who lie in darkness and the shadow
of death 17 .

In Greek, anatolè , to rise from a star, comes from the verb anatello, which means “to rise”
when speaking of a star. It is the star which brings its light when it rises. This Greek word
also designates a twig, a branch. In the context of the Benedictus 18 , it is a star which
germinates, which rises in Mary's entrails. Likewise, this star must germinate and rise in
us:

“So we hold fast to the prophetic word: you do well to look at it, like a lamp shining in a
dark place, until the day begins to dawn and the morning star rises in your hearts 19 .”
  

If this sentence remains mysterious as long as we have not experienced it, the Apocalypse
confirms that Jesus is this luminous star :

“I, Jesus, have sent my Angel to publish among you these revelations concerning the
Churches. I am the offspring of the race of David, the radiant Morning Star .

Paul states the objective:

"For the God who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness!' is the One who has shone in our
hearts 21 …”

And may the morning star rise in your hearts

 

Our luminous body resides within us like a seed ready to germinate. Man can hope to
rediscover this beautiful clarified body, when all things have been consumed and
transformed by the divine agent who sorts the ore. The body of Christ builds us another
body by regenerating our physical body. And, from this temporal world, the physical body
partly accedes to glory. Between these two bodies, there is no opposition. They grow
together and our actions help in the architecture of the body of glory. Symeon the New
Theologian comments on this experience:

“Let us examine carefully whether the rising star has illuminated our hearts or whether
we are still in the darkness of ignorance. Let us fight to increase this divine fire in us 22 !”

In the person of the Christian, it is Christ himself who lives and acts. Symeon describes
the desolation of those who do not have Christ within them and who are inhabited by the
illusory dreams of this lower world:

“Let us see then, brethren, let us examine each other exactly and inquire into the state of
our souls. Is the seal really in us? Let us know if Christ is in us by the marks we have said.
Listen, please Christian brothers, wake up and see if the light has illumined your hearts. If
you have contemplated the great light of knowledge, if the rising star has visited you from
above, manifesting itself to us who sat in the darkness of death. And let us give glory and
uninterrupted thanksgiving to the goodness of the master who has given us this gift and
strive to nourish and increase in ourselves by the practice of the commandments the divine
fire thanks to which the divine light takes on ever more brilliance and strength. »

In his Hymns , he testifies that this rising star was born in his heart, in himself:

“This fire rises in me, within my poor heart, like the sun or like the solar disk. It appears
spherical, luminous, yes, like a flame. I don't know, I repeat, what I can say about it, and I
wanted to keep quiet if only I could. But the fearsome marvel makes my heart leap and
opens my mouth, my soiled mouth, and in spite of myself, makes me speak and write.

He denounces those who believe they possess this experience and those who deny its
possibility here below:

"You who rose instantly in my darkened heart, you who showed me marvels that my eyes
had not seen, you who descended to me as in the last of all, you who had made me a
disciple and son of an apostle, me whom the terrible homicidal dragon had previously
retained as a laborer and instrument of all iniquity, you the sun before all ages who shone
in hell, and who then enlightened my soul plunged into darkness and gave me a day
without decline, O the thing hard to believe for cowards and sloths of my kind, you who
filled the misery that dwelt in me with all good things, you -even, give me a voice, provide
me with words to tell everyone your amazing works and what you still operate today in us
your servants; so that those who sleep in the darkness of negligence and those who say it is
impossible for sinners to be saved and to find mercy like Peter and the other apostles, holy,
blessed and righteous; so that those, those who say this, know and learn that, for such
goodness as yours, it was easy and still is and will be; and those who believe that they
possess you, you, the light of the whole world, and who say that they do not see you, that
they are not in the light, that they are not enlightened, that they do not constantly
contemplate you, O Saviour, let them learn that you have not enlightened their thoughts
nor dwelt in their defiled hearts and that they are wrong to rejoice over vain hopes by
imagining that they see your light after their death. No, it is from here below that the
deposit, it is here that the seal, you Savior you give them to the sheep placed on your right.
If for each indeed death closes the door, if after death for all alike there is nothing more to
be done, and if no one can no longer do good or bad, O my Saviour, then such each one will
be found such he is. will stay."

Elsewhere, Simeon describes the process of begetting the inner Christ or body of glory:

"Let us bring before you Blessed Paul, who says: 'My little children, for whom I again
experience the pains of childbirth, until the Christ is formed in you . ' Where then, according
to him, in which place and part of the body is Christ formed? On the forehead, do you think,
or on the face or on the chest? No, certainly, but inside, in our hearts… Just as a woman
clearly knows when she is pregnant, as the child stirs in her womb, and she cannot ignore
that she carries it within her, likewise he who has Christ formed in himself knows his
movements, in other words his illuminations, is not in the least unaware of his quiverings,
in other words his flashes, and realizes his formation in him .

A contemporary, Louis Cattiaux, echoes this teaching in Le Message Retrouvé :

“O mystery of life, here we are sown and fertilized by the Almighty from our annihilation
before his splendour; and we are already stirring with his marvelous life awaiting the hour
of our rebirth in his imperishable and glorious light 25 …We know that your day is near
because we feel your light stirring in us like the child who is about to be born 26 .
 Ratings
 

1. Jn 3, 3.

2. Gal 4, 19.

3. Hymns .

4. Jn 3, 3.

5. The Cherubic Pilgrim (1, 61).

6. The Cherubic Pilgrim (1, 23).

7. Saint-Martin to Vialetes d'Aignan, January 5, 1787, in Saint‐Martin, Theosophy and

Theology , Martinist Documents , 1980, p. 65.

8. I borrow most of the information that follows from a presentation by Jean-Marie

d'Ansembourg, taken from a cycle of lectures, "The Gospel commented on by the Fathers",
published in the review Le Fil d'Ariane .

9. Col 1, 26-28.

10. Mt 13, 31.

11. Jer 23, 5.

12. Instead of “Germ”, the Greek translated “rising sun”. In Hebrew, the root of this word
means to vegetate, to germinate, to shine, to shine like a star.

13. Za 3, 8.

14. Za 6, 12.

15. Numbers 24, 17.

16. Ml 3, 20. I use here the translation of André Chouraqui, because in the Bible of
Jerusalem , the wings miraculously become rays.

17. Lk 1, 78-79. I still have recourse to André Chouraqui's translation. Where it should be
translated by “the entrails of mercy”, which Chouraqui rightly translates by “the matrices of
help”, the translators of the Jerusalem Bible read “the feelings of mercy”.
18. Lk 1, 78-79.

19. 2 Pet 1, 19.

20. Rev 22, 16.

21. 2 Co 4, 6.

22. Catechesis .

23. Gal 4.19.

24. Ethics X, 870.

25. 306, 102.

26. 31, 54.

 THE ROSARY
 

Now near the cross of Jesus stood his mother and his mother's sister, Mary, wife of Clopas,
and Mary of Magdala.

Jesus therefore seeing his mother and, standing near her, the disciple whom he loved, said to
his mother: “Woman, behold your son. »

Then he said to the disciple: “ Here is your mother. »

From that hour, the disciple welcomed him into his home.

JOHN 4, 19
 The alliance of the rose and the cross
 

To set us in motion, we need a stepping stone. This tool is not the self-proclaimed gurus
who own it. It is not the initiates who strut about in colorful aprons. This tool, you will find
it, dusty, in a small box bequeathed by your grandmother. Century after century, the
apparitions of the Virgin in the West, rosary in hand, confirm her importance.

This tool is the rosary. It is called the rosary , from the old expression “hat of flowers”
which designated a crown of roses 1 on which the rosary was strung on days of jubilation. In
its complete form (a triple rosary), it is called a rosary ; it was a "chapel of roses", a crown
of roses offered to Mary.

This alliance of the rose and the cross, we find it in the hands of the sick in Lourdes, we
see it shelled by the humble in the most isolated countryside.

What is it about ?
 

As a counted and rhythmic prayer, the practice of the rosary is universal. To repeat a
formula was, from the origin of Christianity, a way of praying. The prayer leader felt the
need to count his prayers. The fingers of the hand could initially suffice, but as soon as the
number rose, another benchmark proved necessary. Finally, a wire passing through holes
made in the grains offered a simple instrument.

As part of the prayer of Cenobite monks, the great office was reserved in the West for
clerics who understood Latin. The brothers, called lay brothers or lays, were compelled to
repeat the Pater Noster (Our Father) to replace the office and provide prayer for the dead.
Very naturally, these monks used the rosary that they could make themselves. The growth
of devotion to Mary, mother of Christ, transposed the crown of the Pater Noster en Ave
Maria (Hail Mary).

It was not until the 15th century that the rosary became the rosary, which associated the
repetition of a formula with meditation on the mysteries of Christ. The merit of this
invention undoubtedly goes to a Carthusian, Dominique Rutenus. Another Carthusian
introduced the five Pater Nosters which always precede the five decades of Ave.
 In its final form, the rosary is a method of spiritual realization. It combines three keys;
rhythm, invocation of the divine Name, meditation.
  

Rhythm
 

From East to West, from Buddhism to Islam, man has repeated prayers in rhythmic form.
Through rhythm, the body participates in prayer.

The rosary is based on the slow repetition of ineffable and sacred words (the Our Father
was delivered by Christ himself, the Hail Mary is the prayer brought from Heaven by the
Angel). In the practice of the Rosary, these words – of non-human origin – are activated by
number and rhythm.

Rhythm is what gives shape to the rosary. The numbers on which the rosary is built are 1,
3, 5, 10, 50, 150, 153 2 . If it is true that God created everything with “ weight, number and
measure 3 ”, these numbers are effective. They produce their effects on the subject who
recites the rosary in the proper dispositions. The meaning they carry is comparable to
divine names. They make certain aspects of the divine Essence intelligible to us.

By reciting the rosary in a rhythmic way, the Christian brings himself into harmony with
the numbers on which he is built. He perceives the effects of rhythm in psychic and somatic
modalities. Rhythm brings about an accord between body and soul; he adjusts them to each
other.

Rhythm shakes being. The soul resonating to the rhythm of the universe is then similar to
the primitive chaos shaken by the divine word:

"Let there be light 4 !" »

This ordering prepares the soul to receive divine life. Expressing the rhythm through its
words, the body adjusts itself to it. The being – body and soul – can open up to the effects of
celestial fire. Once again we see the importance of the body in prayer. The body must be
integrated into the spiritual activity, otherwise it will be like an aberrant element and it will
revolt against this activity.

The set of invocations addressed to Mary in the rosary is divided into five tens, five being
the number of the Saviour's wounds. This pentagram is repeated three times to constitute
the rosary, three being the number of the Trinity. The first time joyfully in honor of the
Father, then painfully in honor of the Son; finally, glorious lies in honor of the Holy Spirit.

The body of the rosary is made up of tens, ten being the number of perfection, the sum of
the first four numbers (1 + 2 + 3 + 4). The rosary includes the recitation of the Our Father ,
built on the septenary, since it takes up seven requests which summarize the things
necessary for the harmony of the world. The Creed , with which the recitation of a rosary
begins, is the major initiation of Christianity. Key to gnosis, it was recited orally during the
first centuries. Only the baptized knew about it.

The invocation of the name

 
 In Latin Christianity, the rosary alternates invocations to the Father and invocations to
the Virgin. The invocation is the second essential element of the rosary. By the Hail Mary ,
we put ourselves in correspondence with the universal Mother and we realize the virginal
qualities by the invocation of her Name. The soul becomes pure, that is to say, free from any
imprint. God can be reflected there as the Spirit hovered over the surface of the waters. He
can pronounce the "Let there be light!" which engenders the divine Word in the soul. She
then gives birth to God. Through the Our Father , the soul puts itself in accord with the
divine will. She lets herself be sown, fertilized.

The words of Christ are formal: we must pray in his name, ask in his name 5 , meet in his
name 6 . The divine Name is God in its manifestation. The divine Name is inexpressible in its
essence, but God reveals a Name which is his presence among men. This name is the
support of the divine qualities that we can know. Like any authentic symbol, it carries the
energies of what it represents. For it to be actualized, it suffices to pronounce a divine
Name in interior silence with the intention of the Presence. He realizes these qualities in us
insofar as we make him present by invocation. “Jesus” means “God who saves”. Gold,

"Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved . "

The meditation of the mysteries

 

Finally, the rosary is a support for meditation. The rosary is made up of five decades
corresponding to the Mysteries of Mary's life: Daughter of the Father (joyful mysteries),
Mother of the Son (painful mysteries), Spouse of the Spirit (glorious mysteries). We recite a
triple rosary, in total; 150 grains, like the Psalms.

Each meditation of a mystery accompanied by the invocation realizes the divine quality
inherent in this mystery. The mysteries retrace the spiritual cycle that the soul must go
through. Any human situation can be reduced to a divine prototype experienced by Christ
and his mother. The Universal Man and the Universal Mother realize in their mysteries the
path of the soul towards perfection; the soul meditates and strives to achieve the stages of
this path. This is why the mysteries must be meditated on and then lived in the most
concrete situations of life.

The meditated rosary is the course of three atmospheres: the first, joyful, evokes the
purity of the Virgin, the Annunciation and the earthly appearance of the Incarnate Word;
the second, painful, sinks into the dark and bloody hour of the Passion; the third, glorious,
emerges in the white light of the Resurrection and in the descent of celestial fire on the day
of Pentecost. Each of the three mysteries creates its own atmosphere, that of the dawn of
salvation, of the pain of the dark hours, of the irradiation of Easter light.
 Invocation is facilitated by meditation, meditation is made fruitful by invocation. The
invocation by the formulas of the rosary facilitates the meditation by operating the
concentration of the being.

The rosary is not a reflection on our moods. Meditation (in the usual sense) has no power
by itself; cogitation advances nothing. Meditation alone is sterile.

When we invoke a divine Name in the mystery we meditate on, we allow this Name to
realize in us the content of the mystery. The self effaces itself before what it contemplates.
Through the support of the divine Name, grace (God who gives himself) realizes the
content of the mystery that one is meditating on. To prepare himself to receive it, man can
rectify his intention. The man concentrates on the mystery; he looks at it and examines it
from all sides. Above all, it strives to remove obstacles. The celestial fire does the rest,
provided that the meaning of the mystery is known.

By meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary, the Divine Name realizes in the soul the
mysteries of its existence. This realization stands beyond the psychological realm.
Imaginative or emotional representations can sometimes be helpful but sometimes also
harmful. God's self-communication is beyond their domain.
 Ratings
 

1. The book of Sirach evokes the rose three times and sees in it the wisdom that speaks
and reveals itself as a divine power that can invite itself into men to teach them a behavior
that pleases God (Si 24,14) . The scribe, full of wisdom, invites the Israelites to praise God.
Fidelity to prayer will ensure their spiritual growth (Si 39,13). The sage, praising a high
priest named Simon, will say of him that he is "like the rose in spring" (Si 50, 8).

2. The 153 "Hail Marys" of the rosary; 153 is the number of fish brought back by the net
of the miraculous catch (Jn 21, 11), catch ordered to Peter by Jesus, after his resurrection.
For Augustine, the 153 fish represent the elect regenerated by the Holy Spirit. 153 is the
sum of the numbers from 1 to 17. The rabbis had counted that there were 153 times the
Tetra gram in Genesis.

3. Wisdom 11, 20.

4. Gen 1, 3.

5. Jn 15, 16.

6. Mt 18, 20.

7. Jl 3.5; Rm 10, 13. Certainly, his name was Ieshouah and not Jesus. But imagine that a
child tries to climb the stairs to join his mother and that he does not succeed, despite his
many attempts. Even if his call is awkward, won't the mother come up to him to take him in
her arms?
 HEALING OUR DEAD
 

The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the sons are teased.

JEREMIAH 31, 29
 Trans‐generational psychology
 

For several decades, psychology has recognized the effects of lineage on our behavior.
Understanding the traces left by relationships with our ancestors would help heal certain
traumas.

However, this ancestral influence is not limited to this or that psychic trauma. Each cell
results from all its ancestors. We are billions of years old. And, if our ancestors continue to
live in other forms, their influence is constantly reactivated. No "trans-generational"
healing will be complete without the healing of the ancestor himself 1 .

In addition to the psychological work (cleaning the vase), it is necessary to work

upstream, on the ancestor himself. By praying for the dead, Christianity offers tools that
amplify the healings that the tools of psychology can achieve today.

The prayer for the dead

 

The Old Testament recounts the aftermath of a battle. In the tunics of dead soldiers,
survivors find idols prohibited by Mosaic law. They are dead and cannot repent. Led by
Judas, the survivors pray, send the result of a collection to finance an expiatory sacrifice in
Jerusalem.

“All therefore, having blessed the conduct of the Lord, an equitable judge who makes
hidden things manifest, began to pray to ask that the sin committed should be completely
forgiven, then the valiant Judas exhorted the troops to keep themselves pure from all sin,
having before their eyes what had happened because of the fault of those who had fallen.
Then, having collected about two thousand drachmas, he sent him to Jerusalem to be
offered a sacrifice for sin, acting very well and nobly upon the concept of the Resurrection.
For, if he had not hoped that the fallen soldiers should be raised, it was superfluous and
foolish to pray for the dead, and if they considered that a very beautiful reward is reserved
for those who fall asleep in piety , that was a holy and pious thought. »

It is therefore possible to heal our dead:

 “Therefore he caused this expiatory sacrifice to be made for the dead, that they might be
delivered from their sin . »

The New Testament proposes to the Christian to baptize his ancestors, and to represent
each of them during this baptism:

“If it were otherwise, what would those who are baptized for the dead gain? If the dead
are absolutely not resurrected, why are we baptized for them ? »

The weight of the ancestors

 

A relationship between two people, started happily by each of the protagonists, can reach
a point at which one partner becomes dependent on the other. The passive partner is often
unaware of his loss of identity; he proves unable to break the bond of dependence. Dr.
Kennett McAll shares his experience with us, which in this book I complete with the Marian
way.

During the past thirty years, many of his patients lived their lives under the influence of a
third party who could be living or dead. This third party may or may not be known to the
patient. In this situation, the drugs mask the psychic interference without resolving it.
Psychologists propose breaking the link between the controller and the controlled. Still, the
controller must still be in this world...

Let's start with making the correct diagnosis. The link from one living being to another
living being is the most obvious to diagnose. This link from one living being to another
living being can be a matter of simple psychic dependence. Like the man whose choices and
behaviors are manipulated by his mother. But an African healer would go further. He would
find that certain individuals, when you spent an hour with them, drained you. You feel
exhausted, your vitality has been eaten away. For this healer, the person who eats your
vitality is "a sorcerer", even if the process is unconscious in both parties.

The link between the living and the dead is more difficult to identify. The most common
cases are dependence on an ancestor 4 : father or mother, but this link can skip one or more
generations. In this case, the patient feels overwhelmed by a force that he describes as "a
voice that haunts him", "a weight on the back or chest", "a dark cloud", "a voice that follows
me everywhere ". At times, the words the patient utters are not their own; his actions are
not guided by his will. Finally, the influence can come from an aborted child 5 or simply the
victim of an accidental or natural miscarriage. In these cases, psychological help alone will
be insufficient.

Family tree work

 

If the dependency link is controlled by a dead person, the first difficulty consists in
identifying this person. The simplest approach is to prepare a family tree by asking the
right questions.

It is neither a question of looking for culprits nor of posing as a victim. What appears to
us as dependence on a third party may be a call for help from that third party. An emotional
dependency can be so powerful that it continues beyond death. It is common for a husband
or wife to mourn a dead spouse to the point of premature death. Widowers, during the first
year of widowhood, are ten times more victims of sickness and death than the average
person. In these cases, there is no culprit.

Did an ancestor have significant behavioral problems (severe psychological problems)?

In this case, the patient may show the same feelings, the same aversions, the same
obsessions, the same acts, the same illnesses.

Did an ancestor die when he had committed acts detrimental to life (suicide, murder,
etc.)?

Was an ancestor buried without funeral rites? This may be the case of a person missing at
sea. The control exercised by these people is often a call for help. This is the easiest case to
solve.

Has the patient had any miscarriages or abortions? Did he have a stillborn child?

This research alone has a therapeutic aspect. But let's go further...

The Liberation Process

 
 Deliverance is not a miraculous pill that you just have to swallow to heal. It is a long,
often stressful treatment. It is difficult to cut the cord which binds a man to his mother's
skirts, especially when this cord is so strong that it has prevented the psychological
development of the son. It is equally so with ancestors unknown to the patient. As for
forgiveness, which is essential for a lasting cure, the human will is powerless to push it to
completion. Each of the cells must forgive...

The breaking of the link creates a vacuum. Also, the psychological process is doubled by a
consecration of the patient to the divinity rather than to the ancestor! What do we mean by
"divinity"? For a Christian, it is Christ or the Virgin Mary, mediator between Christ and
man. For the other traditions, the adaptation is often easy, because rare are the spiritual
ways which ignore the weight of the ancestors. What do we mean by consecration? An act
of trust in the divinity (we abandon ourselves to it like a child in the arms of its mother)
and liturgies (renewal of the body and blood in Christianity ).

The moment of definitive liberation is frequently accompanied by strong events. The

interested party will tell you “Something just dropped! The breaking of dependence and the
assumption of responsibility by the divine person can occur simultaneously in the two
protagonists, the dominant and the dominated. It can work for a Christian as well as for
someone who is not. The only thing requested is the acceptance of this transfer, without
prejudging a formal change of religion.
 Ratings
 

1. Psychologists who have turned their art into ideology will refuse this idea without
experimenting with it. Implying that the dead is still alive will be for them an insufficiently
deep vision of the mechanisms of the unconscious. Their beliefs prevent them from
attempting an experiment that could – perhaps – prove beneficial to their patient. Allow me
a personal anecdote from 1977. I was teaching a class of handicapped children. One of them
had symptoms of autism. One day, the hospital psychiatrist, who was in charge of the child,
came to meet me accompanied by a nurse. He explained this to me: “The child's parents are
very Catholic Portuguese immigrants. When the child was born, he was cursed by the
grandmother for dark family reasons. As a result, we come up against a resistance that
prevents any progress in therapy. My response was, "You're lining up with a young priest."
In the presence of the parents, you have him lay his hands on the child while reciting a
prayer. If the parents are right, it will erase the curse. If the parents are wrong, the act will
at least break down their resistance. In both options, the child comes out a winner. The
psychiatrist's response: “We will never fall into such methods. The child therefore made no
progress, owing to the practitioner's prejudices. Moreover, we know today, with three
decades of hindsight, that the theory by which this psychiatrist explained autism (rejection
of the child by the mother during pregnancy) was false. It was part of a superstition in
vogue at that time.

2. 2M 12, 38-45.

3. 1 Cor 15, 29.

4. The patient may also be under the control of someone unrelated to him, a person who
has lived in the same place where he resides, a lineage in which this patient registered
when entering in an initiatory, religious or political movement.

5. I am not placing myself here on a moral level, but on a technical level. Whether it is an
involuntary miscarriage or a voluntary termination of pregnancy does not change the
problem.
SECRET CHRISTIANITY, documents for
study
 1. Interview of NA Motovilov with Seraphim of Sarov
 

Among the contemporary testimonies of the process of deification, I would cite this from NA
Motovilov's account of his visit to Seraphim of Sarov in the early winter of 1831. The saint
explained to Motovilov that the purpose of Christian work was to acquire the Holy Spirit.
Motovilov wondered how one could recognize that one was in the Holy Spirit. Here is the story
of the interview between NA Motovilov and Séraphin de Sarov as reported in Paul Florensky's
book, “The Column and the Foundation of Truth” . »

Father Séraphin then took me by the shoulders, very forcefully, and said to me:

– We are both now in the Holy Spirit, with you!… Why don't you look at me?

I replied:

“I cannot look at you, for lightning flashes from your eyes. Your face has become clearer
than the sun, and my eyes hurt!

Father Séraphin says: Don't be frightened, Your Theophilia! You too now have become as
luminous as myself. You too are in the fullness of the Spirit of God, otherwise you would not
have been able to see me as you see me.

And, leaning his head towards me, he said softly in my ear: Thank the Lord God for his
unspeakable goodness towards you. You have seen that I did not even cross myself, I only
prayed to the Lord within myself and said within me: “ Lord! make him worthy to see
clearly, with his carnal eyes, the descent of the Holy Spirit of which You make worthy Your
servants, when You choose to appear in the light of Your wondrous glory.” And there it is,
my little one, the Lord instantly fulfilled poor Seraphim's request… How can we not thank
Him for this indescribable gift He is giving to both of us? It's because, my little one, even to
the great hermits of the desert, the Lord does not always reveal his goodness. But the grace
of God has kindly consoled your afflicted heart, like a loving mother, through the
intercession of the Mother of God herself… So, my little one, why don't you look me in the
eye? Just look and don't be afraid, God is with us!

After these words, I raised my gaze to his face and I was seized with an even stronger
divine dread. Imagine yourself, in the center of the sun, in the most powerful brilliance of
its rays at noon, the face of a man who speaks to you. You see the movement of his lips, the
changing expression of his eyes, you hear his voice, you feel someone holding your
shoulders; but not only do you not see his hands, you do not see yourself or the other; you
see only a blinding light, which stretches far around, several fathoms away, and which
makes the snow which covers the clearing and the flakes which fell on our heads shine with
its brilliance. Is it possible to imagine the state in which I then found myself!

- What do you feel now? Father Séraphin asked me?

– Extraordinary well-being! I said.

- But how ? What exactly do you feel?

I replied: I feel such serenity and peace in my soul that I cannot tell!

– It is peace, Your Theophilia, of which the Lord said to his disciples: “I give you my
peace, not as the world gives it to you. If you were of the world, the world would love what
is its; but because you are chosen of the world, the world hates you for it. But have courage!
because I have conquered the world. It is to these people, hated by this world, but chosen
by the Lord, that God gives the peace that you now feel within yourselves… And what else
do you feel? asked Father Seraphin.

– Extraordinary softness! I answered.

He continued: It is the sweetness spoken of in the Holy Scriptures: "They are filled with
the riches of your house, and You give them water from the torrent of your sweetness." It is
these delights that now fill our hearts and flow through all our vessels in unspeakable
contentment. Our hearts melt, so to speak, at this sweetness, and we are both imbued with
such bliss that no language could express it… And what do you still feel?

“Extraordinary joy in all my heart!

Father Séraphin continued: When the Spirit of God condescends to man and
overshadows him with the fullness of his coming, the soul of man is filled with ineffable joy,
for the Spirit of God brings joy to everything he touches. It is the joy of which the Lord
speaks in his Gospel: “When a woman gives birth, she is in pain, because her hour has
come; but, when she gave birth to the child, she no longer remembers the pain because of
the joy that a man was born into the world. You will be sad in the world, but when I see
you, your heart will rejoice and no one will take away your joy. But however consoling the
joy you now feel in your heart, it is nothing compared to that of which the Lord Himself said
through the mouth of His Apostle that "no one had seen, nor ear heard, nor to the heart of
man had the good things which God has prepared for those who love him ascended. What
do you still feel, Your Theophilia?

I answered: “Extraordinary warmth!”

- What do you mean ? We are in the forest. It's winter, the snow is under our feet, we
have more than an inch of snow on us and the flakes are falling on us… How hot could it be?

– It's like in the baths, when you throw water on the hot stones and the steam escapes in
spirals...
 - And the smell? he asked me, is it the same as at the thermal baths?

– No, I replied, there is nothing like it on earth. When, during my mother's lifetime, I liked
to dance, went to balls and attended dance parties, my mother sometimes sprinkled me
with perfume that she bought in the best shops in Kazan; but this perfume did not spread
such a scent...

And Father Séraphin said to me, with a good smile:

“I know it as well as you do, my little one, and I'm asking you what you feel on purpose. It
is quite true, Your Theophilia! No sweetness of earthly fragrance can be compared to what
we are perceiving right now, for it is the fragrance of the Holy Spirit of God that surrounds
us. What on earth would be comparable to Him? Notice, Your Theophilia, that you told me
that around us it was as hot as at the thermal baths, and therefore look: neither on you nor
on me, nor under our feet, does the snow melt. This heat is therefore not in the air, it is in
ourselves. It is this same warmth for which the Holy Spirit compels us to cry out to the Lord
with the words of the prayer: “By the warmth of Your Holy Spirit, warm me!” It was
warmed by it that the hermits of the desert, men and women, did not fear the winter frost,
for they were covered, as with a warm pelisse, with the garment of grace, woven by the
Holy Spirit. And it must be so, because the grace of God must dwell in us, in our heart,
because the Lord said: “The Kingdom of God is within you!” By Kingdom, the Lord meant
the grace of the Holy Spirit. Behold, this Kingdom of God is now within us and the grace of
the Holy Spirit overshadows us and warms us also from without, filling the surrounding air
with multiple scents, and delights our senses with heavenly delights, penetrating our hearts
with ineffable joy…”
 2. How to ignite a continual flame in your heart
 

To light the fire within, here are some instructions from Théophane le Reclus (1815‐1894).
They are taken from a text entitled "The fruits of prayer" , reproduced in The art of prayer , a
work published by the Abbey of Bellefontaine. From 1847 to 1854, Théophane explored the
libraries of the Near East and particularly of Palestine, heirs of the Fathers of the desert. He
became a bishop in 1859, then a hermit in 1866. His main legacy is his correspondence,
partially published in ten volumes .

“I will now explain to you how you can kindle in your heart a continual hearth of warmth.
Remember how you can produce heat in the physical world: you rub two pieces of wood
against each other, and the heat comes, then the fire; or we expose an object to the sun: it
heats up and, if we concentrate the rays sufficiently on it, it ends up igniting. In the same
way spiritual heat is produced. The necessary friction is the struggle and strain of ascetic
life; exposure to the rays of the sun is the interior prayer made to God.

Fire can be kindled in the heart by ascetic effort, but this effort alone does not easily
inflame the heart. Many obstacles block the way. This is the reason why, long ago, men,
desiring to be saved, and experienced in the spiritual life, moved by divine inspiration, and
without giving up their ascetic struggle, discovered another means of warming the heart.
They shared their experience with us. This means seems simple and easy, but in fact it is
not without difficulty that we come to the end of it. This shortcut to reach our goal is the
interior prayer that we address, with all our heart, to our Lord and Saviour. Here is how to
practice it: stay with your intellect and your attention in the heart, convinced that the Lord
is near and hears you, and implore him fervently: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have
mercy on me, fisherman !" Do this constantly, whether you are at church, at home, on a
journey, at work, at the table or in bed; in a nutshell, from the moment you open your eyes
until you close them to sleep. It will be just like holding an object under the sun, for it is
holding yourself before the face of the Lord, who is the sun of the spiritual world. At the
beginning, you will have to set a specific time, evening and morning, and devote it
exclusively to this prayer. Then you will find that prayer begins to bear fruit as it takes hold
of your heart and takes root deep within it.

When all this is done with zeal, without negligence or omission, the Lord looks upon his
servant with mercy and kindles a fire in his heart; and this fire attests with certainty that
the spiritual life has awakened in the most secret of your being and that the Lord reigns in
you.
 The distinctive feature of this state in which the Kingdom of God is revealed to us, or -
which amounts to the same thing - in which the spiritual flame burns incessantly in the
heart, is that the whole being is concentrated in its life interior. All consciousness collects
itself in the heart and dwells there in the presence of God. We pour out all our feelings
before him, we prostrate ourselves in his presence with humble repentance, ready to
devote our whole life to his sole service. The soul remains in this state day after day, from
waking up to going to bed; this continues through the various activities of the day until the
sun closes our eyes. Once this order is established in us, the disorders which dominated our
life in the past cease.

The feeling of dissatisfaction and frustration that troubled us before this spiritual flame
was kindled in our hearts, the wandering of the mind that we suffered from, all that has
now ceased. The atmosphere of the soul cleared up, it became cloudless. There remains
only one thought and only one memory, the thought and memory of God. Clarity reigns
everywhere in us, and in this clarity each movement is recognized and appreciated
according to its value in the spiritual light which emanates from the Lord whom one
contemplates. Every evil thought, every evil feeling that assails the heart is victoriously
chased away as soon as it arises. If something opposed to God slips into us in spite of
ourselves, it is immediately humbly confessed to the Lord and washed away by interior
repentance or by exterior confession, so that the conscience always remains pure in the
presence of God. As a reward for all this inner struggle, we get the audacity to approach
God in a prayer that burns incessantly in the heart. This constant warmth of prayer is the
true breath of this life, so that progress in our spiritual pilgrimage stops when this inner
warmth is extinguished, just as the life of the body is extinguished when the natural breath
ceases. »
 3. The cloud over the sanctuary
 

Councilor Karl von Eckhartshausen (1752‐1803) expressed himself most explicitly on the
relationship between "humanity's state of disease" and blood, and on the essential role of
blood in the regeneration of the man. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are taken from
Karl von Eckhartshausen, "La Nuée sur le sanctuary" , Paris, 1948. To write this brief
summary, I have borrowed several comments from Antoine Faivre's work, "Eckartshausen et
la Christian Theosophy” , Paris, 1969.

The man is a hereditary disease

The man considered normal today is a hereditary disease. If we compare it to the Adamic
balance, its condition is pathological. This balance was broken as a result of poisoning by
eating the forbidden fruit:

“The state of disease in men is a real poisoning; man has eaten of the fruit of the tree in
which the corruptible and material principle predominated, and has poisoned himself by
this enjoyment. The first effect of this poison was that the incorruptible principle, which -
might be called the body of life, as the matter of sin is the body of death, the expansion of
which formed the perfection of Adam, became concentrated in the interior and left the
exterior to the government of the elements. It was thus that a mortal matter soon covered
the immortal essence, and the natural consequences of the loss of light were ignorance,
passions, pain, misery, and death. »

The cause of this disease is to be sought in the matter of which man has been composed
since his poisoning. This caused to appear in his blood a ferment of endogenous corruption
of soul and body, which is hereditarily transmissible. This ferment is

“a hidden sticky matter (called “gluten”), which has a closer kinship with animality than
with the spirit”.

On the one hand, it obscures our mental and spiritual functions by chronically
intoxicating our brain. On the other hand, it is the main cause of the corruptibility of the
flesh, the exogenous agents of destruction coming only after it.

 
 What to do ?

“Man is unhappy because he is sick in body and soul, and he has no real medicine, neither
for his body nor for his soul. »

Yet the possibility of recovering our luminous body still resides within us like a seed
ready to sprout. This seed, very real, announces the future angel. How to make it grow?

“Regeneration is nothing but a dissolution and release of that impure and corruptible
matter which binds our immortal being and keeps the life of oppressed active forces
plunged into a deathly sleep. »

By will and asceticism, man can succeed in dominating this ferment of corruption, but it
is not in his power to annihilate it. The cause of physical and moral corruption being in our
substantial nature, the remedy cannot be purely moral:

“We have been moralizing for centuries, and the world is still the same. The patient will
not become convalescent if the doctor only moralizes at his bedside. »

How do we get rid of this ferment of corruption?

“Thus there must necessarily be a real means of driving out this venomous ferment
which causes misfortune in us, and of releasing the imprisoned forces. »

In which direction to look for the remedy?

“The healing of humanity is possible only through the destruction in us of this leaven of
sin; hence we need a doctor and a remedy. »

 
 What remedy will restore our state of glory? Certainly not a medicine borrowed from the
mineral, animal or vegetable kingdoms which are as perishable as we are. Once this
evidence is recalled, it is clear that

“…only the Indestructible can make the destructible indestructible; only what is alive can
animate what is dead. From there, one should not look for the doctor and the means of the
cure in the destructible nature, where all is death and corruption. One must seek the
Physician and the remedy in a higher nature, where all is perfection and life. »

Only an intermediary that is both divine and human, a light energy expressed and coming
from the Father can help us. Every word I utter is the receptacle of my thoughts. Every
thought contains me. Likewise Christ is the receptacle of all the divine faculties expressed
through Him. God expresses a spiritual sun that connects the finite to the infinite. Those
who receive it can become children of light.

The antidote

Let's be more concrete. Here is how Karl von Eckhartshausen likens the universal drug to
a counterpoison:

“When man, by the enjoyment of a corruptible fruit which bore within it the leaven of
death, was poisoned in such a way that everything around him became mortal and
destructible, divine mercy must necessarily establish a counterpoison which could likewise
be absorbed, and which contained within itself the substance which encloses and vivifies
all, so that, by the enjoyment of this immortal nourishment, man poisoned and subject to
death might be healed and delivered from his misery. »

As man became mortal by tasting a mortal fruit, so he will recover his immortality by
tasting an immortal fruit. Also, the remedy should not be sought in nature, but in the divine
corporeity which irrigates everything. It was necessary that a man having escaped the
general hereditary poisoning, while being clothed with corruptible matter like the others,
should give himself to be known as being

“the pure substance from which everything was made. »

 
 Then that he agrees to spill out of his carnal envelope his blood which contained the
incorruptible substance lost by the others and only capable of regenerating them by
operating a dissolution of the corrupting poison:

“[…] it was also necessary that this divine-human form be killed, so that the divine and
incorruptible substance contained in its blood could penetrate into the innermost part of
the earth and bring about a progressive dissolution of corruptible matter […]. »

This antidote, Eckhartshausen locates it in the blood of Jesus Christ, free from any
poisoning, and even in what he calls the " tinctorial strength " of this blood.

Where does the antidote get its power from? The Word of God is not an abstract concept.
It is a living, real substance, to which scripture attributes the Greek name Sophia . In a way,
the seven Spirits who surround the throne of God are seven builders who make this
substance the foundation of Creation. The glorious body of Jesus Christ, and a fortiori his
blood, is composed of this substance. It is possible for man to drink this blood, this salt, this
essence of Light.

The necessary human participation

This regeneration can be understood as the integration of men into the glorious body of
Christ. But also, from the point of view of biology, as a synthesis, in each living man, of
chemical substances linked to the virtues of the body and blood of Jesus Christ. This
synthesis is obtained by prayer, by the Eucharist and by an assiduous and intelligent
imitation to ask for, allow and favor the action of grace even on the somatic level. This -
voluntary participation of men in the life of their model, as well as the communication that
this model gives them of its substance and its power, allow any man who strives there to
realize in himself, in his own blood , the regenerative antidote. In some cases, this
regeneration can extend from here below to the bodily plane:

“Many godly, God-seeking men have been regenerated in mind and will; but few have
experienced bodily rebirth. The latter was also given to few men, and those to whom it was
given was given only that they might work as agents of God, after high purposes, and bring
mankind nearer to his bliss. »

internal alchemy

Man is like a concentrated fire enclosed in a coarse envelope. He is separated from the
primordial fire to which he aspires to unite. The secret of regeneration rests on the
disappearance of the bark which holds prisoner the divine heart, the spark in the depths of
man, the image of God, the kingdom of heaven lost since the fall. For that, we must burn the
envelope that covers us, make sure that this internal fire is not reduced to a very small
spark. He will consume what is impure, modify the body, make it receptive to God. This
alchemist's work falls to the priest:

“A priest is a separator of the pure nature from the impure nature; a separator of the
substance that contains everything, from the destructible matter that causes pain and
misery. The sacrifice, or that which has been separated, consists of bread and wine. Bread
literally means the substance that contains everything, and wine the substance that vivifies
everything. Thus, a priest according to the order of Melchizedek is one who knows how to
separate the substance which contains everything and vivifies everything, from impure
matter; and who knows how to use it as a true means of reconciliation and reunion for
fallen humanity, in order to communicate to it true royal dignity or power over nature, and
priestly dignity or the power to unite by Grace to the higher worlds. In these few words is
contained the whole mystery of the priesthood of God, the supreme vocation of the priest. »

When all things have been consumed and transformed by the divine agent who sorts the
ore, man will find this clarified body. The objective to be achieved is the deification of the
sons of Adam, conferring on the body astral perfection, on the soul celestial perfection, on
the spirit angelic perfection. This is what is called the construction of the Temple in which
God, nature and man will be united forever.

The transformation of the world

Present nature, like man, is a preparation for a new heaven and a new earth. By his death,
Christ tinted the earth. The tinctorial force of his blood penetrated this earth, raised the
dead, broke the rocks, caused a total eclipse of the sun at the moment when it pushed back
the tenebrous parts of the center of the earth towards the circumference. The light entered
this center, founding the transfiguration of the universe:

"The tinctorial force, which flowed from His shed Blood, penetrated the innermost part of
the earth, raised the dead, broke the rocks and caused the total eclipse of the sun, when it
repelled, from the center of the earth in which the light penetrated, all parts of darkness
towards the circumference, and laid the basis for the future glorification of the world. »

Since that moment, the divine force descended into the center of the earth has been
working to exteriorize itself. The luminous essence works tirelessly in nature to bring
everything back to its highest perfection. When harmony will be restored between the
sensible and invisible worlds, nature will have been brought to such a degree of
inalterability that all corruption will become impossible:

“Since the time of the death of Jesus, the divine force, instilled in the center of the earth
by his shed blood, is always working to exteriorize itself and to make all substances
gradually capable of the great upheaval which is in store for the world. »

In conclusion

For our study on the deification of man, Karl von Eckhartshausen proposes two keys on
which he insists at the end of his fifth letter. The first key reminds us that

"In the clear understanding of the Flesh and Blood of Jesus Christ lies the true and pure
knowledge of the effective regeneration of man."

The second key asserts:

“The mystery of union with Jesus Christ, not only spiritually, but also bodily, is the
supreme mystery of the Interior Church. »

This last sentence contains three words that capture the root of the problem: “ But also
bodily. The Christian who grasps this question head-on will truly assume the consequences
of the Incarnation.
 4. Blood Memory
 

These excerpts from an article by Argos (alias Georges‐Auguste Thomas, 1884‐1966), Blood
and some of its mysteries , appeared in "Le Voile d'Isis" n° 142, Oct. 1931, p.p. 582‐586.
Former editor‐in‐chief of the magazine "Le Voile d'Isis" , Georges Thomas had assisted
Charbonneau‐Lassay in the short‐lived reestablishment of the Fraternity of the Paraclete on
September 10, 1938. This fraternity would have been founded or transformed into an order of
chivalry between 1500 and 1510.

These lines develop useful considerations on inheritance by blood. We find there the
meaning of the blue blood specific to the Christian nobility, which had become the instrument
of the divine plan. The indelible mark conferred by the coronation or the priesthood, as well as
certain less advisable magical practices, find their exact place there.

“Our sins are imprinted in our blood and we pass them on to our children as we pass on
hereditary diseases to them, and this is quite ignored today. Our very remote ancestors are
there, in our blood with their qualities and their faults and very often our irrational
impulses are only abrupt awakenings of ancestrality with which we fight. In the path of
asceticism it is not one of the less curious experiences which awaits the mystic than that in
which, when his blood, the blood of his whole lineage which flows through him, will
undergo the necessary transformation, he sees arise from this blood all the ancestors who
have brought him to him, all those at least who have by their efforts added some... quality
to this blood, all those finally who by virtue of these qualities will be entitled, will
participate in a certain measure to the rise of the ascetic. Because, and this is again
something little known: whoever perfects asceticism draws in his wake, although to lesser
degrees, all those of his lineage who were worthy of it. “I saw the picture of my life before I
was born, or rather that of my ancestors,” says Catherine Emmerich. This experience of the
saint awaits sooner or later those who seek to advance on the path, and they then
understand what some have called “the awakening of hereditary memory”. It is also from
this fact that Catherine Emmerich was able to see “that the souls of true nobles have more
influence on their descendants than other souls”; this is why in Zanoni 1 we can read that it
is not permitted to refuse initiation to any descendant of an initiate, even if the initiator
foresees the dangers that this initiation presents for the postulant . But in these last two
cases an external influence has been added, of which it is appropriate to say a few words.
Any coronation, any anointing, any initiation received is imprinted in the blood, is
impregnated in the living substance: it is from this that it is said, during the coronation of
princes and kings, that “by this anointing, the power of the Holy Spirit penetrates through
your blood into your heart”; and this blood once marked is so for generations and
generations. It is here where hereditary royalty finds its fulcrum and where the claim of
nobility, I mean by nobility that of which an ancestor received an anointing, was crowned
prince, duke or count during a special ceremony , was crowned a knight according to the
required rites, it is here where the claim of this nobility to possess a special blood, a “blue
blood”, finds its reality… And if we could show how even today certain bloods , in which
still remains the “hereditary memory” of an ancient coronation, how these bloods seek
each other in a way that could seem completely unconscious and which however is not, to
unite and reform through their union and through their descendants a kind of new noble
class, today where it might seem that castes no longer exist, we would see that there are
very powerful things behind this law of blood. And we would also see that everything that
is imprinted on the blood is imprinted there in an indelible way and can no longer be
erased, except by hard work of asceticism or in some rare cases by hands or by highly
sanctified substances. And I appeal here to those who, having received the orders, having
received the priestly anointing, have then claimed to return "into the world", to tell us if
they really feel like beings "like the others", if they do not have, deep inside them, in their
blood something, from which they suffer moreover, something which differentiates them
and which the slightly sensitive beings feel so well, just by approaching them. As for the
initiation given in the human mode, the mark or the transformation that it causes to the
blood, to the living substance, can be of several kinds according to the force or the degree of
initiation received. But here a new factor intervenes: the person of the initiator. If during
the coronation, during the priestly anointing, it is the power of the Holy Spirit which
overshadows or should overshadow the postulant and if the person of the Pontiff plays a
secondary role in most initiations, this second role is primordial… But then a conclusion is
in order. When the initiator is a Moses or an Elijah, effectively participating in the divine
Spirit, if he is really a sage or a saint, all is well; but are there many Moses or Elias? And if
the initiator, if the Guru is limited in his powers, if his blood is still darkened with “gluten”
what will become of the blood, the living substance of the initiate? He will know, it is
understood, what the initiator knows - and I could make a remark here that probably very
few have had the opportunity to make, which is that when a being participates in the spirit
and the power of another, his words or his writings are so much the echo of the writings
and words of the overshadowing spirit that it is sometimes very difficult to see the
difference...Among those who during the ages where proclaimed themselves or hinted that
they were genuine initiates we sometimes notice quite serious differences both in the
teachings and in the actions and if some show themselves as perfect sages others appear as
less recommendable... and I am not talking about the initiates of the "left hand". It was
because the cloak that was placed over their shoulders was not of fine linen; and therein
lies the danger. It is because they knew this that those who can be called the true Christian
Hermetists, or an Eckhartshausen, have always proclaimed: “It is Christ, the Word and he
alone who must be the master, who must be the initiator. […] It is God alone and his Holy
Spirit who can give you the perfect truth, but you must humbly ask him for it.” "God gives
Wisdom and he spreads it widely on those who love him... but he refuses it to pride and
haughtiness..." And what you need to know is that when the blood, when the living
substance of a being has been marked, like the wax of a seal, and that with his consent, it
will be almost impossible for him, if later he recognizes that the seal has defects, to erase
this imprint. He will only be able to do this by accepting a stronger imprint, by putting on a
more powerful armor, and that will not be without very great struggles and very great
clashes. We could find more than one example. Sometimes even the one who has been
accepted according to the rites, member of an initiatory or occult brotherhood, powerful,
automatically pays with his life, the fault for him of wanting, not to betray the brotherhood,
but only to leave it, to detach himself from it. . One does not play with impunity with the
mysterious laws of blood, and any oath taken binds by blood, in blood. It is up to the
applicant to choose well. All this relates to what I have called initiations in the human
mode, initiations in short… secondary. It is also in the blood, by the blood that operate, as I
pointed out a while ago, on the one hand the blessings and on the other hand, but only and
very fortunately until the fourth generation , the curses, spells, etc. for the son, the
grandson and the great-grandson of a being who has been cursed according to the rites or
of a being who has been bewitched fully and with reason, will still bear the penalty of this
curse or this bewitchment, and here it is a terrible law, a law which is an aspect of that
concerning evils with hereditary transmission but here in a psychic and… magnetic mode…

It is precisely because, through his blood, man participates in the tenebrous nature at the
same time as in the light, because he is at the limit between light and darkness, that he can
act by magic for both good and evil; that it is because the blood contains the two powers,
because it can attract towards itself the forces from below as well as the forces from above,
that it is the principal matter, if not the only one, of all ceremonial magic , the support, the
condenser in the magical evocations of both beings from above and beings from below…
Sky – Man – Earth… But it is also this blood which, with its sister, twins the water from
springs springing from the earth, water from the sacred wells at the feet of the black
virgins, which is the substance used for baptisms and purifications. “He who is victorious
over the world, says Saint John, it is Jesus Christ who came with water and blood.” And one
will understand, I think,... why it was necessary to completely redeem the blood of the
failing Adam that the Light Itself becoming flesh came to pour divine blood into the depths
of the darkened substance, and why there exists for man and for his blood a true
Eucharistic Mystery which is perhaps more transcendent than what we usually believe to
hear under the expression of mystery of the Eucharist. »
 5. Heredo
 

Leon Daudet (1867‐1942), son of Alphonse Daudet, was a famous chronicler and novelist of
the interwar period. He was also the real founder of psycho‐genealogy by observing the role of
blood in our behavior. His book “Heredo” describes the struggle that is waged in each of us
between the determinism of heredity (the self) and the freedom of the person (the self). Peaks
anti‐Germanic aspects of the book can be explained by its publication in 1916, at the heart of
the great slaughter. In this summary, I will not enter neither in the discussion on the concept
unconscious – that Léon Daudet refutes – neither in anatomical considerations (in neurology,
water has flowed under the bridge since 1916). The Roman numerals indicate the number of
the chapter from which the quotation is taken. I used the 1925 edition, identical to that of
1916, but incorporating a few minor corrections.

Against all fatalism

Man has an inner freedom. It allows him to free himself from his hereditary chains –
called heredisms – and to sculpt his own statue. The observation of human behavior
provides some keys to this process.

"This book, and the one that will no doubt follow, have a dual purpose: first, to show how,
contrary to a common prejudice, human personality tends to realize itself fully during life
and to escape hereditary servitude . Then, to help with this realization and this
deliverance… Our ascendants weigh on us, but we can shake off their chains. Each man
carries within him the possibility of a masterpiece, or more exactly of the masterpiece here
below: the blossoming of his own conscience, free from congenital shackles. The tool of this
splendid result is the will in the effort. (Foreword.)

“My readers can thus realize that I do not separate the critical examination of the depths
of the human personality from the therapeutic intervention in the disorders of this
personality , that I do not separate the doctrinaire interpretation from the action. It will be
the whole merit of this little book to learn how not to suffer from diminishments or evils
which can and must be combated. After looking at and studying heredisms, their passages, -
their hold on us, the automaton mechanism to which they sometimes seem to reduce us,
let's look, study the means of escaping them and reconquering ourselves. Let's look, let's
study these two related forces: attention and will. Let's learn to revive our failing self, to
remake it, to use it. Let us learn to come out of passivity and to despise fatalism. (IV)

 
 To refuse to be the plaything of the influences of our ancestral lineage is not to lack
respect for our ancestors. It's a way to prolong their effort.

“I pray that no one sees in this exposition any impiety towards the dead, our ancestors,
whose memory is venerable and whose good examples are precious. Precisely because we
continue them, it is important to enrich and perfect the lineage, each within the measure of
our strengths, and not to be dominated by them. (I)

Introspection and its first findings

Who takes the time to observe themselves? To turn inward?

“The ancient precept 'Know thyself' is very exceptionally put into practice… Who, man or
woman, has spent in front of his conscience a tenth of the time he spends in front of his
mirror, to spy on his physical change? (I)

When I take the time to observe myself, I perceive an agitated fog of presences,
intertwining atmospheres, fleeting images. So many signs of the presence of an interior
crowd, of trampling shadows.

"When we consider ourselves, when we do, as we say, look back on ourselves, what first
appears to us about our person is, in general, a set of memories and presences, a state of
spirit, a glimpse of character and temperament, and vague aspirations of various orders.
Quick vision, most of the time indistinct, and on which we do not dwell, in the ordinary
circumstances of life... Memories, thus surprised by the window of introspection,
sometimes relate to current events, or are in association with it. More often, they are
independent of it, comparable to those shooting stars which, on fine nights, cross the
sparkling regime of the fixed stars. Where do they come from, where do they go? The laws
of their gravitation have never been glimpsed... In addition to complete memories, there is
the dust of memories, landscapes, words, even atmospheres, which run, tangle, interfere
and give us the illusion of an inner crowd, a trampling of shadows in the light. (I)

What fad crossed me? I, who am of a humble nature, succumbed to an unexpected fit of
vanity. He, who is of a miserly nature, has just fried his fortune on a whim. These impulses
contrary to our nature can be the reviviscences of a known or unknown ancestor. These
reviviscences behave like spheres with a life of their own. Let us call "heredo" the man who
abandons himself to these heredisms.

 
 “The glimpse of character and temperament, which appears on introspection , is formed
by our dominant inclinations. This one, who believed himself generous, discovers in him a
bottom of avarice. That one, who believed himself humble, suddenly distinguishes his
vanity and his pride. A skeptic is seized by a fit of resentment or gratitude, when he least
expected it. The wisest, the most balanced , are suddenly crossed by strange fads, to which
moreover they do not follow up, but the wake of which will disturb them and whose return
they will fear. This time, there is no mistake, these phantoms are within us reviviscences, -
reappearances of this or that ascendant, loved or forgotten, known or unknown, – accept
my neologism – heredisms. An ill-healed drunk, returning to his bottle, murmured: “Here is
my uncle who is playing a trick on me again”. (I) […] But heredo does not always recognize
those who come to take their place in its moral and in its physique, in a transitory or lasting
way. Very often, these hosts are mysterious and masked, coming from a distant lineage or
from an ill-known family angle. They pass by, undecided and greyish, sometimes briefly
brutal and rowdy, insinuate themselves slyly, disappear unexpectedly, are replaced by
others of the same pace, with the same posture. We can know nothing more of them except
their momentary influence, their succession, their return, as if they had forgotten
something. They then become innominate psychic protagonists, half-hereditary, half-
imaginative Creations of the self. (III) […] Who are those among humans who have not felt
within them, at certain times, the sudden, parallel, disconcerting juxtaposition of a willful
and an irresolute, of a brave and of a coward, of a chaste and dissolute, of an optimist and a
discouraged? (V) […] Without going as far as self- fertilization, certain heredos, prey to an
ancestor, have a tendency to completely change their voice, in anger for example, or in
surprise. This one, which had a singsong voice, will take on a harsh, jerky inflection. This
one, which usually has a high, almost garish timbre, will use serious, reproachful tones. »
(X)

These influences, however vague and fleeting they may be, are the tip of an iceberg. They
suggest the outlines of an impressive determinism.

“As much as our inclinations, our vague aspirations are, in large part, subject to
hereditary influences. They constitute the margin of the self, the map, apparently mute, of
our future activity. I say in appearance because, if you look closely, many contours have
already been drawn, many lineaments of rivers, forests and states show through under the
deceptive whiteness of the page. (I)

The self

The “I” is actually a set of “little selves”. It is made up of all the conditioning that moves
us, physical or psychic. These conditionings can be due to the outside world as well as to
the ancestors who inhabit us. From this badly put together a state of mind emerges, which
proves to be favorable to life or which hinders its development.

“The self is the whole, physical and moral, of the human individual, which includes
hereditary contributions… The self is a composite garment… I call presences the objects or
people that our self perceives. They make up reality and they serve us as points of support,
in the attention that we transfer from them to us. The state of mind is also part of me. There
are many states of mind. They can be classified as positive, or increasing the rate of life, and
negative, or decreasing it. The predominance of the former makes the optimists and the
energetic. That of the latter, the depressed, the hesitant and the pessimistic. Here the
hereditary turns begin to manifest themselves, with a wealth of forms and variants which,
as we will see, allow choice. (I)

Among the components of the self, the ancestral line of which we are the culmination is
probably the most determining. The slightest of our perceptions can arouse the reaction of
one of our ancestors, which risks overwhelming us momentarily.

“In the ego sleeps or dozes the continuity of the family, comparable to a series of
portraits layered in the dark, of portraits linked, feature by feature, to the corresponding
plots of our individuality. Let an auditory, visual, gustatory, olfactory, tactile perception
shed light on a parcel of our consciousness and here is the corresponding hereditary parcel
which quivers and lights up in its turn, with a more or less large, more or less clear
surrounding territory. , depending on the intensity of the shock. Behind our own reaction,
one discerns, with a little introspective attention, that of the ascendant or the line of
ascendants that this reaction continues. Thus is revived, for a short instant, a fragment of a
hereditary figure, which can be completed, by other awakenings of the same order, by a
subsequent sensory impression . It is the awakening of the ascendant in pieces, its
reconstitution as a game of patience. (II)

Often, several ancestors play their part simultaneously. When the reproductive instinct
(the drive that expresses itself through sexuality) gets involved, it swells and dissociates
the hereditary elements of the ego.

Here are the hereditary imprints, or heredisms, awakened. How will they now behave
towards each other? It is the first act of the inner drama within the self… This inner drama,
as each of us can observe in ourselves, is unceasing. It can darken, fade, like the sound of
the sea perceived at a certain distance, but as soon as we listen, it reappears. It intervenes
in our motives, as in our reveries, as in our scruples, as in our remorse, as in our desires. It
tends to break up our personality into a certain number of characters, who challenge each
other, come to grips, fight, reconcile, calm down, fall asleep , then start again. Most humans
are thus the plaything of influences which they do not seek to disentangle, or which they
baptize with pompous names, such as fatality, necessity, irresistible drive, disastrous
passion. If they looked a little closer, they would see that in three-quarters of the cases they
are victims of an immense letting go and a lazy numbness of the self. They are there, faced
with the hereditary alternatives of their selves, as at the show, amused, then surprised,
then pained, then attached, then enslaved, and, when the idea occurs to them to intervene,
it is sometimes too late for their energy. faulty. So they continue, dissatisfied with
themselves and with others, to turn the wheel of leave . » (III) […] Thus our usual character
is… a composite portrait, formed by a superimposition of various silhouettes; or, better
still, it resembles a theater stage, occupied successively or simultaneously by sometimes -
opposing actors. Just as the stomach digests and the liver manufactures bile and sugar, so
the reproductive instinct typifies. In the ordinary man, this typification takes place in semi-
darkness and in a rather diffuse and incomplete way. In the great artist, the writer, the
leading politician, it leads to these masterpieces which specialize and magnify human
nature. It is because they stimulate the reproductive instinct at the beginning – before
numbing it or destroying it – that wine, alcohol, opium also lead to interior typification. It is
through the reproductive instinct that they act. The excitations of all kinds and the
hallucinations which they procure are paroxysmal typifications, filling the whole expanse,
the whole scene of the ego, whereas in the normal and habitual state, they are content to
play a part in it. Conversely, the inner typification is something like an attenuated
hallucination. It often works without our knowledge, in a withdrawal of consciousness,
from which an emotion brings it out, intensifying it more or less. (V)

The fleeting reaction of this or that ancestor is nothing compared to the takeover by one
of them.

“It is not the same with hereditary plastic awakening by self-fertilization, which is rarer,
but otherwise stable and cohesive. It then seems that the whole being is invaded by
another being, its predecessor in the past, and which comes to replace it, over a large
extent of consciousness, in the way in which a form penetrates into another form. The
approximate term of self- fertilization simply means that, in this imperfect
metempsychosis, everything happens as if the life of a single person recreated another
analogous and earlier life, pleated, gadrooned with a few slight differences. It is then a state
of trance, where we are inhabited and governed by our father, or our mother, or any one of
our ancestors… Life incessantly calls out to life. As it flows, it is reformed, using the
previous elements of the line, and each of our characters carries in inclusion, as if nested
one inside the other, the multitude in abridgement of the existences which have preceded,
the ability to revive them. What sudden echoes, within ourselves, on the occasion of a
simple sensation! Sometimes what a vibration of a chain, whose rings light up as they go,
brightly, then get lost again in the inner darkness! Each of the components of the ego is
replaced by the similar component of the ascendant, the memory by the previous memory,
the state of mind by the past state of mind, the outline of character and temperament by the
'glimpse of character and temperament, the vague aspiration by the more vague aspiration.
So we don't “want” anymore; we are moved by an inherited impulse, or cruelly torn
between disparate inclinations, which put us in a state of hesitation and doubt. Popular
language says that we no longer belong to ourselves. It is the exact truth. One or more
phantoms, sometimes dear but sometimes odious, always imperative, are superimposed on
our personality to the point of masking it, and lead us in directions that we have not
chosen, that displease or repel us. Warned in time, and especially decided in time, it was
easy for us to react against this intrusion, against this expropriation. The habit once
installed, the fight, always possible, becomes more bitter and more painful, comparable to
that against the old influence of a poison…” (II)

This influence may seem favorable to us by making our task easier, for example in the
case of a line of musicians. But it robs us of precious willpower when an undesirable
ancestor takes over.

“Our work, our job, whatever it is, is strangely made easier. The poet believes that his
Muse inspires him. The blacksmith, the baker find their work finished without fatigue. The
speaker feels that another, who speaks through his mouth and gesticulates through his
gestures, is continuing his speech… The hereditary inclination, excessively cultivated,
causes the harmful ascendant to find its bed ready prepared in us by the departure of the
beneficent ascendancy. The fold of congenital passivity is to be avoided. (II) […] The
phenomenon known as precocity, in whatever branch of knowledge – music, mathematics,
drawing – it occurs, is nothing other than the result of hereditary superimpositions of the
same meaning, at the within the me. Let us suppose that, in Pierre, three ascendants out of
four were very gifted from the point of view of calculation, or algebra, or geometry, that
they had a sense of the number and position of figures, in one word, the
compartmentalization of space and time. Pierre, inheriting three positive faculties of the
same meaning, will very early have the most remarkable dispositions for mathematics , or,
if it is a question of an auditory and rhythmic heredo, for music. He will easily be a young
prodigy. Exceptionally, these gifts will persist into middle age, which was the case with
Mozart. More often they will vanish with the phantoms which roused them, and of these
dazzling but ephemeral faculties only the bitter memory will remain. It is because heredity,
even favorable, is disappointing that it is advisable to reinforce the self, by marking their
limit to mirages. (III)

The self is a crystallization, a synthesis of all these factors. This synthesis is constantly
changing. The reviviscences which disintegrate it to produce a new synthesis are hardly
perceptible in everyday life.

“These are the components of the self. The synthesis operates constantly and suddenly,
like sparks which would come to explode in front of consciousness, forming lines and
figures. Even when an act or a project monopolizes our attention, this explosion of the
infinitely small, many of which are hereditary reappearances, occurs. It is with these
reviviscences like the beating of our heart, which we hardly perceive in ordinary times, but
which an emotion makes manifest to us and sometimes to the point of pain. (I) […] During
this time, the reproductive instinct, which never remains inactive, at least in normal beings
and until the confines of old age, activates, swells, bursts, regency these heredisms, which
combine with each other, come apart and recombine, in the successive resemblance of such
and such of our ancestors. It is a whole inner cosmogony, brought together in a few great
atavofigures, which thus composes the intellectual, moral, organic personality of the self,
capable of being watched over, directed, constrained, balanced by the self, but also capable
of masking and covering the self, to blunt its active will and ultimately deceive its wisdom.
An infinity of psychomoral spheres, drawing together heredo constellations, all in
perpetual motion, such is, in my opinion, the most accurate picture that we can make, in the
end, of our self. (IX)

Heredo abandons itself to its heredisms. He is recognizable by his worried air, his
feverish gesture, his chronic instability. He seeks to exorcise the demons that inhabit him
through activism, but he gives up before reaching the end of each step undertaken.

"Morale is such a sculptor of the physical, by the outline of voluntary tonus or heredity,
that it only takes a few minutes of presence or conversation for the informed observer to
discern, in the passing, in the interlocutor, a heredo or a self-master. The heredo offers a
tormented and feverish face, sometimes beautiful and proud in one of its parts, but
otherwise giving an impression of strangeness or embarrassment. His gaze is worried or
too sharp, his delivery nervous and hasty, his movement impatient. He is subject to sudden
outbursts of anger or, on the contrary, to silent periods, during which, withdrawn into
himself, he seeks himself in vain in the maze of his ancestors, in the labyrinth of sensations,
perceptions, altered impulses, I mean come from his lineage. It is not a question here of the
abnormal, to whatever type it belongs, but of the heredo considered unanimously as
normal, as an ordinary person. He alone knows what it is. When he listens to the countless
murmurs that run through him, like the rustle of a sea shell, he passionately hopes to free
himself from them, by sound, by pen, by brush; then he despairs of staring at them, he gives
up, he gives way to melancholy, which all undecided people know with high foreheads, pale
or congested, and with strong jaws , whose hands are shaking with nervous tremors... I
have met, during my life, a large number of heredos, some filled with the highest faculties,
but among whom the taste for change and the aptitude for variations and mood swings
could be considered almost as a defect , in any case as a characteristic sign… This is an
observation that I have made quite often: heredo in general flees men and seeks the desert.
He feels ill at ease in society, hurt by his contacts, and he prefers to enjoy exactly,
voluptuously the resurrection which takes place in him, in front of the forest, the sea, the
eternal ice or the ruins. Music is an appeasement for him, because it gives him the illusion
of clarifying his inner imprecision and of counting, through sound and rhythm, so many
confused forms, such a great flow of moral silhouettes. No doubt the saint also seeks the
desert, but it is with the intention of resistance, in order to consolidate his self there,
sheltered from worldly temptations, whereas the desire of heredo is precisely to abandon
oneself and to forget one's self in the ancestral ment scatter . (II)
  

Quite different is the man who is master of himself, who has been able to find the
balance, the healthy compromise between the ego and the self.

"Everyone else presents himself as the master of himself, the Goethe, the Mistral, the
peasant, the bourgeois ignored, but strongly balanced, who impose on us their penetrating
and calm gaze, their understanding smile, their accentuated but balanced language, poised,
punctuated, their smooth and jolt-free character and their patient, thoughtful will. We have
all known these bright-eyed grandmothers, who knew how to run their homes, manage
their assets, raise their children, close their husbands' eyes, maintain commercial credit.
Compos sui 2 , said the sober Latin excellently. (II)

The self

Continuing my introspection, I note the presence of a free zone. By observing myself from
this zone, I have a margin of action. I choose to discard this or that contribution that comes
my way, to balance it or to let it merge with other contributions. This free zone, of a
homogeneous nature, let us call it the “self”.

"The human individual... is made up of two clearly differentiated poles : one formed of
presences external to the individual and of inherited elements or hereditary elements ,
themselves divided into tendencies, inclinations, mental signs, signs of signs and vague
aspirations. It's me. The other, made up of three elements melted into one, nevertheless
distinct, varying with age and coacting. It is the self, which includes: the creative impulse,
the tone of the will and the wise balance by reason. The self is transmitted from generation
to generation. The self is, by definition, intransmissible from one individual to another,
from one generation to another. The self endures, through the lineage, in various forms. But
it can alter and disappear, like the organism to which it is connected. The disappearance of
the self is inconceivable. (Conclusions) “The self is the essence of the human personality,
released from these contributions by their elimination, their balance or their fusion, and
constituting an original and new being, perceived as such by consciousness… The itself is a
fabric of a single piece, if not of a single weft. (I) […] The immortality of this “something”…
suddenly appeared to me as very natural and also as very personal, without any image,
almost without abstraction. Death, on this “something”, had no hold. This “something” was
not transmitted hereditarily . It was recreated, this “something”, with each new human
being coming into the world. Thus, going to the end of my thought, it was the transmissible
and the transmitted, that is to say the hereditary , which grew old with the individual,
disappeared with the lineage, instead of the intransmissible, that the individual was almost
unalterable during life and immortal after death. This “something” was the self, whose
immortality can only be an absolute reality, whereas the immortality of the self – its
hereditary transmission – is conditional and figurative. (VI)
  

The self is more difficult to discover than the me. We can nevertheless recognize three
attributes in it; the creative impulse or initiative, the tone of the will and the state of
equilibrium.

“The self is more difficult to discover and analyze than the me. It is also more active and if
one can say more virulent, as the personality takes shape and fixes itself. He is the real
protagonist of the human being. I distinguish at least three elements: the creative impulse
or initiative, in the intellectual or the sensitive; then what I will call, for want of a better
word, the tonus of the will; finally a state of balance, which tends to inner harmony or
wisdom. (I)

A mother can give her life to save her child. I can sacrifice the image that the ego has of
itself to a cause. The impulse that drives me to it comes from the self. This initiative frees
me from the ghosts that shape the self.

“The creative impulse or initiative derives from the self, it is, so to speak, its emanation,
in its essence and in its beginning. But, at the same time, it frees the individual from all his
hereditary ghosts , which it transmits, in two forms, to posterity. It is both the highest
expression of the self and the greatest moment of dissociation and scattering of the self.
The hero who immolates himself in his country, in full consciousness, the novelist or the
playwright who gives life to a masterpiece, the scientist who bares a law of nature, the
lover who hugs the lover in his arms, the child who forges a word or a cry for his sensation,
the philosopher who encounters a new vein, all thus manifest their self by the sacrifice and
the fragmentation of their ego. It is by giving themselves that they conquer themselves. We
must not believe that superiority of mind is indispensable to this conquest. She is totally
independent. The simple wanderer of the road, the peasant or the sailor deprived of
bookish knowledge, the reasoning little man of seven, are housed, from this point of view,
on the same landing as the artist, the writer, the thinker of genius . It is a wealth devolved
to all those who deserve it by their effort. (I)

For the creative impulse or initiative to be exercised, the tone of the will must be
available. It is the tension which precedes and enables the act of will. In view of a goal to
reach, a problem to solve, our thoughtful will is moved only by ourselves.

"The reduction of defective inclinations, liable to degenerate into real vices - especially at
the time of sexual formation - is on the contrary something easy and, I repeat, pleasant, as
long as the will is capable of functioning. . Only the reduction or paralysis of this makes the
fight more difficult, without it becoming impossible for that reason . I will say how. (I) […]
This effort is the tone of the will. It is like the permanent tension of the self, which precedes
and enables the act of will. We feel it when, closing our eyes, we strongly imagine, through
the imagination, a goal to be reached, a problem to be solved, an expenditure of energy to
be provided. The tone of the will measures this energy. Through him, our personal moral
defense is, as they say, on the safe side. Some possess this faculty to an eminent degree in
the physical realm and make elite fighters. Others possess it in the intellectual domain and
make the leaders and conductors of men, for their superiority, promptly discerned and
recognized, groups around them the legion of beings who need a point of support. But if it
is given to few humans to possess the voluntary tone of a Jules César or a Richelieu, all can
maintain and develop in themselves, through exercise, this essential component of the self.
If it is correct to say that when we yield to our inclinations of temperament, of character,
and to our vague aspirations, we are moved by our ancestors, it is no less correct to add
that, in the tension of our will reflected, with a view to a definite action, we are only moved
by ourselves. What will be, you ask, the criterion between these two very distinct principles
of action? There is only one, but powerfully supported: balance by reason. (I)

The will, like every muscle in the body, works if it is used regularly. Otherwise, it
atrophies. The weakening of the will cannot serve as an alibi for inaction. You do not buy a
wheelchair for your child to prevent him from walking! Any psychological, political or
medical doctrine which establishes and confirms the irremediable absence of will is
totalitarian. It implies that there is no place in man that escapes physical and psychic
determinism.

“You know the old objection: but how do you lean on the will , when in the majority of
these cases of depravity it is the will itself that is ill? Now, we have learned that the tone of
the will escapes heredism. It can be rusty from lack of exercise and forgetfulness. It cannot
be destroyed, broken or rendered unfit for use. What makes him wrongly believe is that
reason is, at the same time, obscured by the vapors of the reproductive instinct and the
suffusions of heredity... The treatment of so many morbid alterations, of which we now
know the cause, therefore, will consist in: 1. Methodically clarifying the judgment, by
developing the introspection of the self, and to arouse it, by restraining the suspicious
images and relivings of the self; 2. To revive the tone of the will through a clear vision of the
goal to be achieved, of the moral health to be regained; 3. To seek a powerful diversion in
the creative, artistic, literary, scientific, political impulse, with a view to wise balance. (IV)

To get closer to balance, it is necessary to identify the figures that follow one another in
us. The eruption or withdrawal of a heredism leads to sometimes considerable
consequences. In the following excerpt, one phrase is the key to the Healing Our Dead
chapter of this book. Note this sentence: "This is what causes rapid convalescences and
unexpected cures, when an ancestor, in leaving, takes away the evil he had brought, while one
of the spheres drawing his moral outline within the self bursts tearing and scattering its
physical outline within the organism. »
 "The more vigorous and active the self, the more diverse, brilliant and swift are these
hereditary systems of the self, the more rapidly they are moved, the more also they
segment, reassociate and transform themselves into other ancestral figures, as well as into
the well-known children's game called the kaleidoscope. When you turn the kaleidoscope
between your hands, applying it to your eye, you see the brilliant fragments falling, one on
top of the other, composing a geometric figure, which are at the base of the apparatus. A
new assembly is reconstituted of shapes, designs, colors. And so on, almost indefinitely. The
same is true of the heredisms or heredopresences that make up our ancestral
psychofigures. This is what brings about, in strong natures, that is to say in all humans
endowed with a powerful self, these voltes and sudden transformations of personality and
will, which subdue the environment, the adversary and even the circumstances of life. This
is what makes, in weak natures, the perpetual crumbling of projects, of resolutions and
irresolutions, the dust of abulias and phobias, the withdrawal into cachexia and marasmus.
This is what leads to rapid convalescences and unexpected cures, when an ancestor, by
leaving, takes away the evil he had brought, when one of the spheres drawing its moral
outline within the self bursts tearing and scattering its physical outline within the
organism. Analysis allows us to dissociate certain heredoconstellations closer to our self
and to discern the psychomoral spheres that compose them. Synthesis allows us to
recognize some of our great hereditary figures. But there are others, located in the depths
of the ancestral line, like star systems at the bottom of infinite spaces, which introspection
does not allow us to resolve, at least until now. This introspection itself has been the
prerogative of a small number of humans and this explains why the moral has not yet had
the domination reserved for it over the physical. For the self can only overcome, that is to
say dissolve, for another distribution and a new equilibrium, the heredoconstellations, only
if it has clearly recognized them, only if it is capable of naming at least their principal
elements, their heredospheres of first magnitude. Thus, on the organic level, a remedy
elects such and such tissues, which react to its contact, in such and such a way. (IX)

Except in exceptional cases, we are neither the heredo entirely moved by its hereditary
conditionings, nor an abstract being who would have completely discarded them. Between
the determinisms that move us and the zone of freedom, a balance has to be found. Human
reason is the tool that works out this balance or tries to approach it.
and even inconceivable, was the most misunderstood principle of psychology in the 19th
and 18thcenturies… This intellectual balance and moral is however specific to the human
being, at least as much as language. By its virtue alone, it exists, develops and increases, or,
in the decay of being, diminishes and becomes stunted, without however ceasing to be
perceived by him who sinks. As the magnet of the compass seeks the north, human reason
seeks balance, the condition of inner happiness. It does not always achieve it, it even rarely
achieves it. But his very search starts from the self and returns to the self. There our
ancestors are no longer for nothing, either they withdraw, intimidated and feeble ghosts,
before this vital essential, or they interfere and annihilate each other in this masterpiece of
compensation. The influence of the miserly father is counterbalanced by that of the
prodigal mother, that of the debauched uncle by that of the chaste grandmother, and in the
midst of this balance of opposing forces, to which time gives solidity, grows, prospers and
soon dominates that incomparable flower of the spirit, summit of our species and reflection
of the divine, which is called reason. From the day it is constituted, nothing will escape its
empire. A very just feeling of inner freedom, more and more lively, accompanies his
progress. It too, like creative initiative, is independent of social situation, like age, like
culture . She too is enriched by radiation and earns as she spends herself. (I)

The game of me and self

Human existence is marked by a fragile compromise between the me and the self.

“The movement of the sentence, ample and harmonious, translates the predominance of
the self; disordered and carried away, the victory of the self and of heredisms. » (X)

At certain stages of life, around the age of seven for example, the self predominates. At
others, like adolescence, the effervescence of the self prevails.

“What are the moments in life when we come closest to the self, when, on the contrary,
the self predominates? I can only give here the result of patient observations. I think that
the seventh year is very conducive to the formation of the self and the benefits that this
formation confers. The seventh year, when the sexual disorder does not yet exist and the
language is completely formed, up to the understood degree which we call individual style,
the seventh year borders on reason. She reaches him. The child sees correctly, appreciates
healthily, knows the value and importance of effort, is open to faith. Then comes the
confusion of puberty, its troubled images and the effervescence of the ego. At twenty, once
again, but ephemerally , man draws closer to himself and seeks himself, without
discovering himself. Then his ancestors harass him again, turbulent and imperious if he
abandons himself, if he finds it more beautiful to stray into all the paths, all the experiences
they lead him into. There are, of course, exceptions, twenty-year-old sages, but rarer than
seven-year-old sages… From thirty-five to forty, the being is oriented and complete. He can
make his choice, be a heredo or a man, a tossed consequence or a principle, resist and
conquer, or yield to the slumber of the will, fall prey to phantoms within and circumstances
without. He can also, at this time, react by freeing himself through creative initiative. It is
high time, for otherwise he will no longer belong to himself until death and he will have
crossed this world, like a puppet moved by the strings of hereditary. » (I) […] We must
distinguish in the amorous attractions: 1° Those which derive from two selves, barely
tinged with heredisms of the self; 2° Those which, beginning with the self, are quickly
covered over by the heredisms of the self; 3° Those in whom the heredisms of the self are
oscillating, unstable and periodically leave the two selves in the presence... When the love
between two beings derives only from an attraction of their heredisms, the intervention of
the self of one or of the other makes it stop. There follows a deep impression of deliverance.
This is why the love of this category must be considered as a sleep of the will, a sleep
capable of awakening. (VIII)

Around the age of fifty, heredisms embark on a new assault. This sometimes results in a
change in behavior, a stunted side, which surprises those around you. Sometimes, the
entourage is not so surprised when we hear him say with resignation: "The older he gets,
the more he looks like his father!" »

“Experience and observation also show us in our fifties , a critical age, a new onslaught of
heredity. I noticed that the apprehension, then the fear of death act here as stimulants of
congenital reviviscences within the ego. How many calm, calm people, having led a
punctual and reasonable existence until they approach fifty, suddenly become debauched,
gamblers or lazy, or fall into a sordid avarice, into diurnal and nocturnal rapacity! It is not
difficult then, for those around them, to find the uncle or the grandfather, whose faults and
vices live on in them, at the same time as their face takes on this troubled mask, mixed with
lust and harshness. , which is the physical symptom of the grip. The expression of their gaze
changes. They often look like sneaky or hunted beasts. Happy when these strays from the
lineage, free however from any cerebral lesion properly speaking, do not disappear in
suicide, or in an animal death! In certain women of good social standing, but of weak
clairvoyance and willpower, one noticed, shortly after the menopause, sudden tendencies
to wantonness, to alcoholism, to gambling, which are indeed what one can imagine. sadder
and more dangerous. These were heredos who did not know themselves, in whom the
penchant for the dislocation of the ego by the inner ghosts had remained concealed or
latent. Under the influence of the return of age, the ghosts became aggressive and easily
triumphed over an unprepared or timid self. Because the trap of true timidity is not to dare
to act freely, in accordance with the tone of the will, with a view to balance. (II)

death does not lie

The agony frees heredisms. But at the moment of death, sometimes another face appears,
in which the self can finally breathe.

“The serenity of death, a phenomenon often noticed in beings otherwise very agitated
before this supreme moment, is due to the sudden emancipation of the self, in the breaking
down and unbinding of the self. The agony can be considered as the last effort of heredisms,
against the profound individuality, of the transmitted and obsolete elements against the
personal and immortal principle. (VII)
 6. Consecration to Mary
 

Louis‐Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673‐1716) was a tireless missionary in word, writing

and foundation. He is, in particular, at the origin of the Missionaries of the Company of Mary,
better known under the name of Montfortins, and of the Daughters of Wisdom. He was
canonized in 1947.

There is a shortcut

The author has discovered a shortcut to achieve divinization. Nothing less. He wants us
to borrow it:

“This devotion to the Blessed Virgin is a short way to find Jesus Christ, either because one
does not get lost there, or because, as I have just said, one walks there with more joy and
ease. , and therefore, with more promptness 3 . »

This process consists of placing oneself entirely in the hands of Mary, out of love and will.
To become, through her, a slave of Jesus Christ. We give everything we have and everything
we are to the Virgin Mary. She's a good treasurer. She will know how to use it in our best
interests.

Slave ! This provocative word does not evoke a dependency, but a voluntary
disappropriation, carried out by love. It is intentional self-giving. Through constant
vigilance, it gradually becomes effective. It is a tender technique, but not sentimental. We
go to Our Lady like a child to his Good Mother, with complete simplicity and absolute
confidence on all occasions. To grow a rose, it needs heat and humidity. To succeed in the
Great Work, matter must be subjected to gentle heat. Far from the stiffness of certain "ego
breakers", consecration to Mary brings this aqueous warmth which transforms with
delicacy.

This gift can make everyone the most free being there is. And this because it frees us
from another slavery, this one real, to the powers of the world. There is, so to speak,
reciprocity. If we give ourselves without reserve through Mary to Jesus Christ, he will give
himself to us. He will become the servant of servants 4 .
 Grignion de Montfort develops and systematizes a practice which Christianity had had an
intuition from the beginning. Its oldest type, at least as regards the desire for protection, is
found in our Sub tuum , of which a first Greek version was found on an Egyptian papyrus of
the fourth century . It is reported that the city of Constantinople, besieged by the Barbarians,
was consecrated to Mary, from the 5th century . If we move on to the West, the custom of
placing oneself personally under the gentle servitude of Mary appears and develops in Spain
in the 7th and 8th centuries. A remarkable case is that of Pope John VII (701-707) who,
having had a fresco and an ambo executed for the Church of Saint Mary Antique in Rome,
signed them “John, slave of the Mother of God”. But it is especially from the feudal period
that examples abound.

We know that in the heyday of medieval Christianity, the hierarchical structure of society
was based on the exchange of loyalties. The vassal paid homage to his suzerain, declaring
himself his man, his horse binder-servant, in return for which the latter invested him and
protected him. It thus happened that a free man, having done bad business, presented
himself to a Lord, the strap around his neck, signifying by this that from a free man he
became a serf, engaging his person, his family, his property. Similarly, following, it seems,
Saint Odilon, Abbot of Cluny, we gave ourselves to Notre-Dame by constituting ourselves its
serf.

We then saw whole abbeys choose Our Lady as abbess, in order to place themselves
under her protection, a practice which has been preserved in certain monasteries. Soon, the
spirit of chivalry being involved as well as courtly love, the Virgin Mary became the Lady
par excellence whom we served and sang, under whose gaze we worked and fought. Lords,
princes, even kings made it a point of honor to offer him in homage their fiefs, their
domains, their kingdoms, in other words to consecrate them to him. This is what King Louis
XIII did for France, in Abbeville, in 1638. It was already no longer the Middle Ages.
However, at no time were the brotherhoods of servants of Mary more numerous. At the
same time, the Congregations of the Blessed Virgin, founded in Rome in 1563, experienced
an admirable development. Until in 1830, the Virgin Mary herself asked Catherine Labouré
for the institution of the Children of Mary Immaculate, known as “de la rue du Bac”.

To complete this brief history, I will recall a contemporary event. Under the rule of a
communist regime, and therefore an atheist, the Poles of the 1960s were waiting for a
miracle. Cardinal Wyszynski, arrested on September 25, 1953, transferred at night to four
successive jails until 1956, was the dominant figure in the Catholic world of this country.
Asked about the causes of his inexplicable success , he replied: “It is the Blessed Virgin. It
was at the beginning of his captivity, on December 8, 1953, that he made his consecration
to Mary, according to the instructions of Grignion de Montfort. In the same spirit, he
entrusted Poland to Our Lady, on an Assumption Day, during his captivity. On August 15,
1966, for the millennium of Christianity in Poland, he made, with the bishops, the
consecration of the nation, according to the same formula. Everyone remembers what
happened next; the rise of the Solidarity trade union at the end of the 1970s, the overthrow
of the regime.

Marie is forma dei , the active mold of God

Before going into the method, let's understand the link between Mary and Jesus. Mary
engendered the humanity of Jesus. The flesh of Jesus is that of Mary itself. The same
chromosomal series makes it impossible for someone who takes communion and who calls
himself a Christian not to be Marian. What is born of Mary is only a human nature, like ours.
But he who was born from her is not a human person, he is the Word of God. His union with
the Word is therefore the greatest that can be conceived. Her motherhood engages her
whole life, spiritual but also physical. In his bowels, in his heart of flesh, we see the
supreme union of a created person with the Creator. And the physiological aspect is only
the least, although it is not to be neglected. Insofar as the heart is an organic principle of all
physiological life, the heart of Mary was the principle of the bodily generation of Christ. And
this heart continues to live and beat, in the most physical sense of the term, where the body
of Mary has been since the Assumption.

The key to the process proposed by Grignion de Montfort lies in two words that define
Mary: forma dei . It is appropriate to dwell on this Latin expression, present in the two texts
that I reproduce below. It means something like “active mold of God 5 ”. To grasp its power,
it is necessary to understand what the words “form” and “matter” mean in the language of
the time.

Imagine a small fish in a bowl of pure water. For him, water does not have its own reality,
since the environment in which it evolves is homogeneous. Nothing he can see, touch, taste.
But the little fish runs into an ice cube. In what appears to him to be a vacuum, there hangs
a large compact pebble which he bumps into. The little fish will have to make an effort of
abstraction to understand that the ice cube is not a different material; he is water become
something. The image is valid for the human being. Matter is not this pebble in which I can
kick. Because this pebble is already matter that has become something. It is matter
structured by information. In the same way that an ice cube is "informed 6 " water. Matter is
therefore a potentiality that can become anything, form is what structures it, what makes it
become something. Without form, matter has no quality of its own. In this sense, matter is
pure power. Any image that we can form of it is already that of “in-formed” matter.

In the created world, there can be no matter without form or form without matter. If a
creature were only form, it would identify with the archetype, and ultimately, with God. In
philosophy, the word form is therefore not synonymous with figure , as in vulgar language
(“a sheet of triangular shape”). The form is an active mould, a structuring matrix. It is the
projection of an archetype into matter.
 Consider a phenomenon like nutrition followed by assimilation. Pierre eats bread and
potatoes. What's going on ? Science can describe various physico-chemical processes here,
but philosophy is interested in something else. She observes that Peter, once fed, eliminates
certain elements of the bodies he has eaten, but at the same time he retains something that
he has changed within himself, incorporated into his very being. He doesn't have bread and
potatoes in his flesh or in his blood. Of the food he has absorbed and digested, something
remains and something has disappeared. What do you mean by that? Foreign and inorganic
elements have become part of a living thing. They now exist in an entirely new way. They
are incorporated into this whole that is the living, determined and specified by its own
form. When one form replaces another, something remains: matter. That is to say, the
material substratum, the potentiality which has received the new form instead of those
which previously determined it.

Let's reread the first sentence of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and
the earth 7 . In the beginning, two things are created: heaven and earth. Master Eckart
(around 1260-1327 or 1328) sees here an allusion to form (the sky) and matter (the earth).
For him, form and matter are thus posed as the principles, active and passive, of Creation.
Because the earth is created, the sky is already affixed to it as an archetype.

From then on, we understand the teaching of Grignion de Monfort. As a human subject to
mortality, I am a combination of matter and form. I must reach the state of molten metal
(matter stripped of its form) and throw myself into another active mould: Mary. Grignion
de Monftort offers nothing less than the operative key to divinization, approached with the
genius proper to Latin culture.

Mary's Secret

Le secret de Marie , an excerpt of which I reproduce here, is an abridgement, in the form of

a letter addressed by the author to a nun, of Grignion de Montfort's masterpiece, the "Treatise
on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin” . This word "secret", rare in religious literature,
recalls "the secret of the king" (Tb 12, 16), that is to say of God. The term here is equivalent to
mystery in Paul: a gift from God that surpasses all human knowledge.

Mary is called by Saint Augustine, and is, in fact, the living mold of God, forma dei 8 , that is
to say that it is in her alone that God [made] man was formed naturally without he lacks
any trait of the Divinity, and it is also in it alone that man can be formed into God by nature
9 , as far as human nature is capable of it, by the grace of Jesus Christ.
 A sculptor can make a natural figure or portrait in two ways: 1st, using his industry, his
strength, his science and the goodness of his instruments to make this figure in hard and
shapeless matter; 2° he can cast it into a mould. The first is long and difficult and subject to
many accidents: often only a chisel or hammer blow, given at the wrong time, is enough to
spoil the whole work. The second is prompt, easy, and gentle, almost painless and costless,
provided the mold is perfect and represents the natural; provided that the material he uses
is easy to handle, not resisting his hand in any way 10 .

Mary is the great mold of God, made by the Holy Spirit, to form naturally a God-man by
hypostatic union 11 , and to form a God-man by grace. This mold lacks no trait of divinity;
whoever is thrown into it and allows himself to be handled also, receives therein all the
features of Jesus Christ, true God, in a gentle way and proportionate to human weakness,
without much agony and labor; in a sure way, without fear of illusion, because the devil has
not had and will never have access to Mary, holy and immaculate, without the shadow of
the slightest trace of sin. Oh ! dear soul, what a difference there is between a soul formed in
Jesus Christ by the ordinary ways of those who, like sculptors, trust in their know-how and
rely on their industry, and between a soul well manageable, well loosened, well melted, and
which, without any support on itself, throws itself into Mary and lets itself be handled there
by the operation of the Holy Spirit! That there are stains, that there are faults, that there are
darknesses, that there are illusions, that there is naturalness, that there is humanness in
the first soul; and that the second is pure, divine and similar to Jesus Christ!

Treatise on true devotion to the Blessed Virgin

This treatise is intended for the true devotee, in the noble sense of the term. If we stop to
appearances, we will see there a pious work for the use of bigots. Passing beyond the letter,
the sagacious mind will discover effective teaching.

After having denounced seven kinds of false devotees, Grignion de Montfort defines the
true devotee, who is very rare:

“Those who are led by the spirit of Mary are children of Mary, and therefore children of
God […] and among so many devotees of the Blessed Virgin, there are true and faithful
devotees only those who are led by his spirit. (No. 258.)

To be led by the spirit of the Blessed Virgin requires that we renounce our spirit (n° 259),
that we become aware of our mortality and that we empty ourselves of ourselves:
 “To empty ourselves of ourselves, we must first know well, by the light of the Holy Spirit,
our bad bottom… (n° 79.) […] Secondly, to empty ourselves of ourselves, we need all the
day to die to ourselves: that is to say that we must renounce the operations of the powers
of our soul and of the senses of the body, that we must see as if we did not see, hear as if we
did not did not hear, to use the things of this world as if one did not use them at all 12 , what
Saint Paul calls dying every day 13 . (No. 81.)

This death is possible thanks to outside help:

“Only the Holy Spirit can make known the truth hidden beneath these figures of material
things. (n° 261.) […] The wretched children of Adam and Eve, driven out of the earthly
paradise, can enter it only by a particular grace of the Holy Spirit, which they must deserve.
(No. 263.)

Read with attention, certain passages take on an unsuspected alchemical and astrological
coloring. Here is a selection:

– “(Mary) is the dawn which precedes and discovers the Sun of justice, which is Jesus
Christ. (no. 50.) […] Let us therefore say boldly […] that we need a mediator with the
Mediator himself, and that the divine Mary is the one who is most capable of fulfilling this
charitable office; it is through her that Jesus Christ came to us, and it is through her that we
must go to Him. If we are afraid to go directly to Jesus Christ our God […], let us boldly
implore the help and intercession of Mary our Mother […]. It is not the Sun, which, by the
vivacity of its rays, could dazzle us because of our weakness; but it is beautiful and gentle
like the Moon, which receives its light from the Sun and tempers it to make it conform to
our small reach. (no. 85.) […] The Most Blessed Virgin is the faithful Virgin who, by her
fidelity to God, repairs the losses that unfaithful Eve caused by her infidelity, and who
obtains fidelity to God and perseverance to those who care about her. This is why a saint
compares it to a firm anchor, which holds them back and prevents them from being
shipwrecked in the rough seas of this world, where so many people perish for lack of
clinging to a firm anchor. (no. 175.) […] If Mary, who is the tree of life 14 , is well cultivated in
your soul by fidelity to the practices of this devotion, it will bear fruit in its time; and its
fruit is none other than Jesus Christ. […] But by the immaculate way of Mary and this divine
practice that I teach, we work during the day, we work in a holy place, we work little. There
is no night in Mary, since there was no sin or even the slightest shadow. (n° 218.) […] that
the salvation of the world having begun with the Ave Maria, the salvation of each one in
particular was attached to this prayer […] which caused the dry and sterile Earth to bear
the fruit of life , and that it is this same prayer, well said, which must cause the word of God
to germinate in our souls and bear the fruit of life, Jesus Christ; that the Ave Maria is a
celestial dew which waters the Earth, that is to say the soul, to make it bear fruit in due
time; and that a soul which is not watered with this heavenly prayer or dew bears no fruit,
and gives only briars and thorns, and is ready to be cursed. (n° 249.) […] There is in this
place (the earthly paradise of the new Adam, that is to say the Blessed Virgin) a pure air,
without infection, of purity; a fine day, without night, of holy humanity; a beautiful Sun,
without shadows, of Divinity; a fiery and continual furnace of charity, where all the iron
that is put [into it] is kindled and changed into gold; there is a river of humility which
springs from the Earth and which, dividing into four branches, waters all this enchanted
place 15 ; these are the four cardinal virtues. (No. 261.)

Let's see the passage parallel to the extract from the Secret of Mary that we read above.

“Please notice that I say that the saints are molded in Mary. There is a great difference
between making a figure in relief, with blows of hammer and chisel, and making a figure by
casting it into a mould: sculptors and sculptors work a lot to make figures in the first way,
and they have to a lot of time: but in doing them in the second way, they work little and do
them in a very short time. Saint Augustine calls the Blessed Virgin forma Dei : the mold of
God: Si formam Dei te appelm, digna existis 16 , the mold suitable for forming and molding
gods. He who is cast into this divine mold is soon formed and molded in Jesus Christ, and
Jesus Christ in him: at little expense and in a short time, he will become god, since he is cast
into the same mold which has formed our God.

"It seems to me that I can very well compare these directors and devout people who want
to form Jesus Christ in themselves or in others by practices other than these, to sculptors
who, putting their confidence in their know-how , their industries and their art, give an
infinity of blows of hammer and chisel to a hard stone, or a badly polished piece of wood, to
make of it the image of Jesus Christ; and sometimes they do not succeed in expressing Jesus
Christ in the natural way, either for lack of knowledge and experience of the person of Jesus
Christ, or because of some badly given blow, which has spoiled the work. But for those who
embrace this secret of grace that I am presenting to them, I compare them with reason to
founders and molders who, having found the beautiful mold of Mary, in which Jesus Christ
was naturally and divinely formed, without relying on their own industry, but only to the
goodness of the mould, throw themselves and lose themselves in Mary to become the
natural portrait of Jesus Christ. »

“O beautiful and true comparison! But who will understand it? I want it to be you, my
dear brother. But remember that you only cast into a mold what is melted and liquid: that
is to say, you must destroy and melt the old Adam in you, in order to become the new in
Mary. »
 Ratings
 

1. Edward Bulwer Lytton, Zanoni the master Rosicrucian , chapter IV: “You ask me why I
have shown so much interest in your destiny. There is a reason that I have not yet confided
to you: there is a brotherhood whose statutes and mysteries are, for scholars, an
impenetrable secret. By virtue of these statutes, each member is required to guide, help and
advise the descendants of those who, like your ancestor, took part, however humble and
sterile, in the mysterious work of the Order. . We are designated to guide them towards
their happiness; moreover, if they command us, we must accept them as disciples. I am one
of the survivors of this ancient and venerable Brotherhood. This is what first attached me
to you, this is perhaps what, unbeknownst to you, son of our Order, attracted you to me. »

2. Compos sui , self-master.

3. Treatise on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin .

4. Cf. Lk 12, 35-38.

5. Grignion de Monfort wrote devastating lines to denounce false devotees. These make
him feel good. In some footnotes, they explain without a smile that the expression forma dei
is a poetic figure that the reader can pass over.

6. If I want to be rigorous, I must point out that the comparison with water that has
become an ice cube is insufficient. For water is already matter which has become
something under the effect of form.

7. Gen 1, 1.

8. Grignion de Montfort borrows this expression from Pseudo-Augustine ( Serm. 208 on

the Assumption, no. 5: PL 39, 2131).

9. “Natural”: resembling.

10. The author, a sculptor himself, speaks from experience. Another spiritual author, Jean
de la Croix, uses the image of the painter to invite this docility: he cannot succeed in his
work if the model is constantly moving.

11. “Hypostatic union. By this expression is meant the union of the divine nature and the
human nature in the one person of Jesus Christ.

12. Cf. 1 Cor 7, 31.

13. Cf. 1 Cor 15, 31.

14. Cf. Gn 2, 9.

15. Cf. Gn 2, 10.

16. " You are worthy to be called the mold of God. »

 LIST OF BIBLICAL ABBREVIATIONS
 

Unless otherwise stated, biblical quotations are taken from the Jerusalem Bible . Here are
the abbreviations that designate the different books. The order of the books is that
observed in the Catholic Bibles.

OLD TESTAMENT

La Genesis Gn

Exodus Ex

Leviticus Lv

The Numbers Nb

Deuteronomy Dt

The Book of Joshua Jos

The Book of Judges Jg

The books of Samuel 1 S and 2 S

Books of Kings 1 R and 2 R

The Books of Chronicles 1 Ch and 2 Ch

The book of Esdras Esd

Book of Nehemiah

Toby Tb
Judith Jdt

Esther East

1st Book of Maccabees 1M

2nd Book of Maccabees 2M

Job Jb

The Psalms Ps

The Proverbs Pr

Ecclesiastes (or: Qohelet) Qo 1 re

The Song of Songs Ct 2 e

The Book of Wisdom Sg 1 re

The Ecclesiastic (or: Sirac) Si 2 e

Isaiah Is 3 rd

Jr. Jr.

The Lamentations Lm

Baruch Ba 's book

Ezekiel Ez

Daniel Dn

Hosea Bones

Joel Jl

Amos- Am

Obadiah Ab

Jonah Jon

Micah Mi

Nahum Na

Habaqq Ha
Zephaniah So

Haggai Ag

Zachary Za

Malachi Ml

THE NEW TESTAMENT

The Gospel According to Matthew Mt

The Gospel according to Marc Mc

The Gospel according to Luke Luke

The Gospel According to John Jn

The Acts of the Apostles Ac

Epistle to the Romans Rm

1st Epistle to the Corinthians 1 Cor

2nd Epistle to the Corinthians 2 Cor

Epistle to the Galatians Ga

Epistle to the Ephesians Ep

Epistle to the Philippians Ph

Epistle to the Colossians Col

1st Epistle to the Thessalonians 1 Th

2 nd Epistle to the Thessalonians 2 Th

1 st Epistle to Timothy 1 Tm

2 nd Epistle to Timothy 2 Tm

Epistle to Titus Tt

Epistle to Philemon Phm

Epistle to the Hebrews He

Epistle of Jacques Jc

Epistle of Peter 1 P

Epistle of Peter 2 P

Epistle of John 1 Jn

Epistle of John 2 Jn

Epistle of John 3 Jn

Epistle of Jude Jude

The Apocalypse Ap
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 cover

 INTRODUCTION

o Ratings

 GNOSIS

o What are we talking about?

o What gnosis is not

o The teaching of gnosis

o Gnosis, a state and a teaching

o Transfiguring the created without denying it

o Mary, guardian of gnosis

o Ratings

 MAN, IMAGE OF GOD

o As his look

o And in his likeness

o The image is unalterable, the resemblance must be restored

o The reality of man is found in the archetype

o From spiritual to biological

o Ratings

 THE DEIFICATION OF MAN

o Become what we are

o The Word is the maker of gods

o The Body of Glory

o The feel of the bones

o Her face beamed

 o Ratings

 THE TRANSFIGURATION OF THE WORLD

o what death destroys

o I saw a new heaven and a new earth

o Creation groans in labor

o Ratings

 THE STAGES OF REVELATION

o The divine pedagogy

o The first revelation

o The second revelation

o The Third Revelation

o Ratings

 HOW TO DO?

o How to undertake our divinization?

o man side

o God side

o Ratings

 KNOW YOURSELF

o Prepare to receive

o Bringing order out of chaos

o Self-knowledge or self-contemplation

o A radiant crystal crowded with reptiles

o Ratings

 THE YOUNG
 o The body has its place

o The transition to food

o What should humans eat?

o The lifting of food restrictions

o Ratings

 THE SILENCE

o Learn to be silent to listen

o The silence of the soul

o The objective silence

o spiritual silence

o Ratings

 THE BREATH

o From the breath of God to the breath of man

o Between the drops of time

o Ratings

 THE TRANSPARENCY OF THE BODY

o When the priest becomes an actor

o The right gesture

o sacred space

o How to clean the unconscious?

o The secret of tears

o Ratings

 MYSTERIES

o water, blood and flesh

 o Baptism

o the eucharist

o Ratings

 WHEN THE SPEECH CATCHES FIRE

o Scripture study

o The literal meaning and the spiritual meaning

o The germination of the inner man

o Ratings

 PRAYER _

o Prerequisites

o Words are deceiving

o Where to pray?

o Prayer: what for?

o How to do?

o insistence

o short prayers

o perpetual prayer

o Ratings

 THE WAY OF THE HEART

o The place of the heart

o heat and fire

o The end of things

o Ratings

 BLOOD MEMORY
 o The whole man is renewed

o The body must follow

o From bodily substances to blood

o The work of regeneration

o Our father in heavens

o Ratings

 CAN BLOOD OVERCOME DEATH?

o Divine blood, universal antidote

o The right gesture

o Ratings

 AND MAY THE MORNING STAR RISE IN YOUR HEARTS

o soul pregnancy

o The embryo of immortality

o And the morning star rises in your heart

o Ratings

 THE ROSARY

o The alliance of the rose and the cross

o What is it about?

o Rhythm

o The invocation of the name

o The meditation of the mysteries

o Ratings

 HEALING OUR DEAD

o Trans-generational psychology
 o The prayer for the dead

o The weight of the ancestors

o Family tree work

o The Liberation Process

o Ratings

 SECRET CHRISTIANITY, documents for study

o 1. Interview of NA Motovilov with Seraphim of Sarov

o 2. How to ignite a continual flame in your heart

o 3. The cloud over the sanctuary

o 4. Blood Memory

o 5. Heredo

o 6. Consecration to Mary

o Ratings

 LIST OF BIBLICAL ABBREVIATIONS

 BIBLIOGRAPHY