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object:1.02 - In the Beginning
class:The Wherefore of the Worlds
author class:Paul Richard
magazine class:Arya
class:chapter

In the Beginning
1914 Tue 15 September


In the beginning God. So runs the first word of all our occidental theology, using the formulas of the traditional conception which it has borrowed from the Hebrew Genesis.

And by God when it emerges at all from its puerile anthropomorphic notions, that theology understands the first Unity, the pure Essence which is preexistent of all multiplicity. But by this conception it erects before it, in its very first affirmation, the most insoluble of problems. For out of absolute unity nothing at all can issue.

One can conceive such a unity, it is true, as an existence without cause, but it is only by totally ignoring the conditions of thought and the fundamental demands of Reason that one can see in it the cause of existences. Mere unity is by its very definition entire sterility; it is multiplicity alone that can produce multiplicity. The notion of cause is exclusive of the notion of unity; for the essence of unity is an indivisible, indiscernable, immobile identity.

If then we give the name of God to the primordial existence which produces the universe, we postulate the whole of universal multiplicity in this essential cause and all the possibilities of the world are totalised in the first Being, creator of the world.

But then this total sum of the possibilities is not a being , it is the universe itself before manifestation; and it is no longer in the unity, in God, that we can place the first origin of things. Things bear in themselves their own origin.

The antecedent of the manifested universe is the non-manifested universe. And if it is that which is called God, God does not create the world, He becomes the world.

If then a necessity in the human mind compels it to postulate behind all plurality a simple principle of unicity, that unicity, containing in itself all possibilities, has nothing in common with our mathematical concept of unity; it is an absolute unknowable by our thought.

From the point of view of this Absolute, one can with equally good reason affirm that God is or that He is not, that He is the unique or that He is beyond number, that He is inseparable from the universe or that He is without relation to the universe. He is being if all outside Him is non-being, He is non-being if universe exists. So is He defined in certain sacred books of the East.
***

When we speak of a beginning we are only determining arbitrarily the limit at which the unique becomes thinkable for us, the point at which it passes for our thought, by a progressive realisation, out of pure potentiality into the concrete actuality.

But this point cannot be the mathematical and indivisible point of Unity; it can only be the first dynamical point, the simple system of generative forces, the meeting-point, for production, of at least two original principles.

This is why certain systems of theology, in order to escape from the contradictory postulate of unity as a cause, have sought in a less unproductive dualism the explanation of the beginning of things. And although they have by a misdirected mysticism, falsified the term and distorted the idea, it is in them that we recover the tendencies most in harmony with the very data on which the belief in a divine Creator is founded.

Let us take, for example, the Bereshit.

If, restoring to the Hebrew characters their numerical value and hidden sense, we analyse the text, then we must thus read the first word of Genesis, The primary duality was in the beginning. For the sign B which corresponds to the second figure in our numerical system, represents a double original principle which the succeeding letter Resh characterises as the very head and supreme Cause of formation. And by a remarkable, though fortuitous coincidence, we find that the sacred book of Islam, like the sacred book of Judaism commences, in the initial of its first word, with the sign of duality. The first word B-Sem-Lillah (Bismillah) placed at the head of the Koran can, when its elements are decomposed, be interpreted, Two is the name of Allah.

And this name, Allah, itself contains the symbol of that union between the two complementary poles of being out of which the Universe is generated. Formed of twin syllables of which the first has for its initial letter Alif, the characteristic sign of the Masculine, and the second for its final letter He, the constant symbol of the Feminine, it seems to be merely the inversion in combination of one and the same essential article and can be mystically translated, as indeed it is translated by some of the Sufis,by the two pronouns He and She.
***

Before anything can exist, there was the Indiscernable, and the first entities that we can discriminate as the cause of all that is, can be summed up at the farthest limit of our concepts in these two supreme principles. Their equilibrium is the goal towards which tends a world born of their eternal union.

They have been differently interpreted from varying points of view. But it is not with impunity that the true notion of the great Duality has been corrupted by so many religions and philosophies. Some of these, the better to exalt one of its two Puissances, have robbed the other of all character of divinity, and transforming complementary into contradictory principles have personified them sometimes as the two eternally active and eternally antagonistic powers of Good and Evil, or, again, have deified the Pure Spirit in opposition to the vileness of Matter, which is yet capable of being a field for the Spirits creative activity.

And wherever Philosophy has made itself, according to the ecclesiastical formula, the handmaid of Theology, it has ended by arriving at the entire negation of the Principle which Religion has abased.

Thus the rigid cult of the male Principle, formulated in the adoration of a masculine and celibate God, has given birth to an exaggerated dogma of spirituality which translates its contempt for nature and for life into an ascetic mysticism.

In the social order this tendency of thought has had for its corollary the institution of an autocratic regime and the despotic domination of man over woman and of the Sovereign over the State. For so great is the influence of religious and philosophical ideas on the life of a people and the practical forms in which it is embodied that on the rectitude of its notions about God depends its respect or its contempt for the rights of the masses and the rights of women. And, on the other hand, it is on this respect or contempt that by a projection of life into the domain of thought, depends the formulation of its notions about the origin of things and its concept of the Godhead.

But there is always a tendency towards equilibrium in things and all excess brings as its result a contrary excess. Therefore we see this extreme spiritualising trend in human thought bring about by reaction against itself its own opposite in the form of a strait and exclusive materialism.

And it is in the countries where the masculine Principle has been most singly adored that it comes to be denied with equal exaggeration to the sole enthronement of its antithesis. One day, under the name of Nature, the Feminine takes its revenge. Art aids Science to restore her cult, on the ruins of the supernatural there is erected a positivist Revelation and God vanishes from view in the ideas of Force, Substance and Movement.

It is as a result of the meeting of these two tendencies and in those points in which the great opponents have at present succeeded in neutralising each other that the religions of the West, in order better to adapt themselves to the needs of life and the demands of Reason, have toned down their dogma and softened the rigidity of their iconoclasm.

The periods of renascence have always been those centuries in which the longing for the Beautiful has awakened along with the need for the True; they are the epochs in which crucified sensibility and Reason have been restored to life.

Catholicism itself was modified for the better under the influence of the feminine Principle from the day when the Virgin Mother took her place close to the masculine Trinity, and it is the cult of Mary, more than anything else, that has saved the Faith from the fanatical aberrations of the Middle Ages and the Church from the reprisals with which she was threatened. If this feminine symbol had been the object of interpretations less gross, the Church might have found in it the means by which she could have succeeded in wedding together the two contrary tendencies of the human mind, unifying the discoveries of Science with the intuitions of faith and transforming her ignorant spiritual dogmatism into a spirituality worthy of the name. She would then have understood that the true Mater Dolorosa is no other than this suffering Matter whose progressive evolution is indeed a perpetual Assumption.

But it is not merely in the realm of the intellect that we see today the rehabilitation of the misunderstood feminine Principle. In the social order also the emancipation of thought has for its sequel the emancipation of the peoples and after the Rights of Man have been affirmed, the Rights of Woman begin to assert themselves. And it is by a perfectly logical consequence that the feminist movement coincides everywhere with the materialistic; for they are, in sum, two corollary aspects of the same original reaction.

The excess of the reaction would consist in the establishment of equality of powers between the two sexes to the detriment of the diversity in their duties. That would be another way of misunderstanding Nature and would bring woman again under the dominion of the arbitrary masculine principle by identifying her with man under pretence of liberating her. We shall find the truth of Nature not by a double use in the same sense but by an equilibrium of the two complementary Principles.

It is true that these human complements, however dissimilar in their functions, are identical in their deeper essence. But the identity is of a purely spiritual character and represents the identity of the two principles which form the world, two in their work, one in their unknowable origin. It brings us back to the primary unity of the Indiscernable, beyond all differentiation, outside the manifested world.
***




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