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The Reconstruction of the Soul

An e-book by Lee van Laer

$15.00

Order the PDF version of the Book

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Apple users should buy the itunes version from the Apple bookstore.

The Reconstruction of the Soul is a wide-ranging investigation of symbolism in High and Late Medieval art. It includes detailed analyses of the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cluny Museum and the Cloisters in New York, as well as detailed examinations of the mysterious, erotic and bizarre symbolism in The Cathedral of St. Lazare in Autun. Along the way, it traces the roots of Western esoteric art from Babylon to ancient Greece, revealing traditions that are still alive today, some 3000 or more years later.

The material is illustrated with photographs taken by the author on location in France and New York, as well as source material from various museums.

It will appeal to anyone interested in the symbolic transmission of the world's Western esoteric heritage.

The author is currently at work on a second volume which will explore even earlier (!) influences on esoteric art and practice. Anticipated publication of this follow-up work will be late 2019.

Introduction

I
My fascination with the art of Hieronymus Bosch has led me, over the years, to question the source of his imagery, which, although it has some few precedents, consisted of so many extraordinary images concentrated in the relatively small space of each painting.

The images spread out in each painting like the leaves of a tree, somehow collectively illuminating all of human imagination. In a reciprocal process, as the light of our own intelligence falls on this imagery, we are illuminated by ourselves; the images enter us, and we ponder their nature and meaning.

Inevitably, the question arises: what are the roots of this tree? What soil did it grow in; what rains fell on it, what nourished it?

We know so little about the man himself it seems impossible; his peers were public figures and there are more than a few documents describing their lives and interests. Yet Bosch is an enigma, even more so than his paintings: his paintings, after all, leave a dense record of his interests, skills, and talents, yet the documentation on his life is incredibly scarce. Where did he get his ideas? Why do they look the way they do?

In July 2017, my wife and I took a trip to France to visit Cistercian abbeys. Inevitably, some of the Gothic cathedrals in Burgundy ended up on our itinerary; and we were concurrently exposed to the deep Roman roots of the area. Dijon, Lyon, Vienne: these were thriving cities in the Roman Empire. Any itinerary to visit Gothic cathedrals in France is also an opportunity to stand in the footsteps of the societies that preceded them and birthed them; the connections between the art and architecture of the Roman Empire and the blossoming of the great sculptural traditions of the high Middle Ages run deep. One can’t look at the Gothic capitals in, for example, Vezelay or Vienne without considering the fact that the stonemason’s tradition which made them possible existed in an uninterrupted line from the Roman empire up to the age when they were carved; yet across the length of that timeline, a transformation in the understanding of imagery took place. It was biblical, of course, but it was not only biblical; the elements of design that evolved from Roman and classical tradition were informed not just by the storytelling of the Christian religion, but by pagan imagery that simply could not be expunged and exists side-by-side in the Christian lexicon all the way up through the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, where pagan images not only coexist with Christian ones, but enhance our understanding of them.
Underneath all this, inevitably, lurk the beasts and angels of mankind’s collective unconscious: deeply Jungian archetypes, visions of heaven and hell, extraordinary combinations of human and animal. These themes were meaningful in classical times; yet one can argue that something took place during the Middle Ages which alchemically transformed the mythological imagery of classical Greece and Rome into an esoteric wine of even greater strength and power.
During this period, the understanding of the human soul gained subtleties and strengths unavailable in the context of the vain and petty gods of Greece and Rome; the psychology of man’s spiritual evolution was investigated through deeply meditative practices propagated in monastic communities, and informed by subtle Eastern influences flowing into Europe not only from the Islamic empires, which had close contacts with the Far East, but from the Far East itself by way of the silk Road.

By the time the Middle Ages come to an end, there can be no doubt that things had changed; this powerful confluence of multiple religious practices concentrated itself in the esoteric religious communities of Europe and gave rise to an extraordinary flowering of the arts and spiritual sciences. The great Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres represent the architectural apogee of that movement; the sermons of Meister Eckhart represent the cultural and literary pinnacles which were attained. In both cases, the achievements represent the tip of a great iceberg, 99% of which is hidden beneath the oceans of history. Behind the cathedrals at the Masters are countless thousands, perhaps even millions, who toiled to make the contributions whose results culminated in the understandings of the age.

These understandings represent, I believe, a reconstruction of what it means to be alive: a rediscovery of much more ancient traditions that have followed the evolution of man societies since the last Ice Age. Over millennia, there have been cyclical rememberings and forgettings of where we come from, who we are, and where we are going to; the periodic destruction of great societies intermittently resets the clock, leaving it to future generations to reinterpret the fragments of their discoveries. We pick up the pieces of what we are in a material and temporal sense understanding that each one of them is a reflection of what we are, in one way or another, in a spiritual sense; but unlike Humpty Dumpty, there’s always a chance to put it back together all over again, because we exist — we are here — whole and alive. And we can breathe and think and speak much better than any broken egg.

The great masters of the traditions in medieval Europe understood things which we do not understand today; at that time, there was a confluence of planetary influences that produced many extraordinary souls all across the world: Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart, St. Francis of Assisi, Rumi, and Dogen, to name just a few. Their legacy remains alive within those who seek spiritual wholeness. Hieronymus Bosch, whose paintings represent the most intriguing artistic coda of that effort, is just one piece in a great puzzle. It turned out, as the trip to France evolved, to be impossible to separate a search for the roots of Bosch and his art from the greater questions of our place in the cosmos, which were evident everywhere one looked.

This book is, then, part historical investigation, part travelogue, and part archaeological reassembly of ideas, places, and the artistic trends that evolved as the societies documented their concept of their place in the cosmos.

The modern mind comes to the art and culture of the Middle Ages singularly unprepared to understand how our European ancestors thought about the world.

In our modern world, increasingly and even fanatically secular and more and more devoted to the worship of things and cultural memes, rather than God, it is nearly impossible for us to understand a society whose whole purpose was to see the world through God’s eyes and perform every act in life as an act of worship. We have not just lost our sense of the sacred; we are, collectively, no longer even sure there should be a sacred, as the world of mechanistic rationalism crushes everything in a quite literally soulless path.

Consequently, we view medieval artworks and architecture through occluded eyes. Our vision doesn’t have the capacity to see what they saw; we’ve forgotten, for the greater part, how deeply inward the personal journey for every person of means, and most of those without, was during this period of Western culture. When we see medieval artworks — whether it be unicorn tapestries, paintings by Bosch, Gothic cathedrals or Cistercian abbeys— the inner questions they were (and are) asking are obscured.

Yet it’s the philosophical and theological underpinnings of these works that make them compelling — not the materials that they were made of, the money that was spent on them, or the craftsmanship that created them. If artists of the middle ages had, for example, made jewel encrusted, obsessively detailed golden statues of Little Red Riding Hood for millions of ducats or guilders, and left them behind, they might be valuable, but they would be impossible, like Marvel superhero movies, to take seriously. The heart of an object’s value lies in what it symbolically represents; and during the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians, as well as practicing masters of the inward craft such as Meister Eckhart, achieved a level of inner insight that has not been truly equaled in the Western world to this day. The arts they left behind are a record of that of inner mastery, which ranged from so-called romantic “decorative” works like the unicorn tapestries, which are the visual equal of Rumi’s poetry, to the exquisitely understated minimalism of the capitals in the chapter house at Thoronet abbey.

Scattered throughout the artistic record are an extraordinary number of details of the philosophical and theological discoveries and insights of the period; and without a doubt, many of them are just as esoteric as Meister Eckhart’s sermons, which stand to this day as one of the world’s great achievements in spiritual teaching of any kind, Catholic or otherwise.
We too easily forget that this kind of influence was not just present in medieval culture; it was pervasive. Our arts today are informed by no such lofty considerations; instead, we have Iron Man and Captain America, Lady Gaga and Jeff Koons. Even if we reach back 50 years to supposedly higher points in American art and culture, such as the works of Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg, we may find great beauty in the work — and that, of course, is still a wholly subjective question — but we will not find the same kind of deep thinking about the nature of man’s inner state. Even if one argues that such thinking was present in the artist, there is no shared basis in the symbolic language the artist created to communicate it. It is thus a closed system, a form — if you will — of spiritual masturbation. Masturbation may be fun, and it is harmless, but it doesn’t lead to growth—isn’t procreative. The arts of earlier ages (especially pre-Renaissance arts) were meant to be culturally and spiritually procreative, that is to say, they shared traditional symbolic languages with an intention to pass information on.
Our culture has largely abandoned that premise. If there is any single cultural premise we deem worthy of procreation in our society, it seems to be banality. It breeds the way guinea pigs breed; and we love it.

Even if we see imagery that creates a Zenlike impression such as the work of Mark Rothko, which does emanate a craftsman’s energy of spirituality, we cannot sense or extract 5000 years of symbolic history from such works. As we shall see, that is indeed possible with the art of the middle ages — but we have abandoned it in favor of symbolic languages that are too unique and idiosyncratic to bind us together culturally, which is one of the reasons for the discord we see in today’s world.

Art was always meant to bring human beings together in a sense of shared cultural values. When it fails to do that, the societies degrade and collapse.

III

Artwork of the modern world has become apophatic— in a certain sense, if it is about God, it is always about what God isn’t. There is nothing overtly wrong with this kind of art, and it has a definite validity of its own in regard to the position it takes. Yet we must understand that much of the elaborated art of the middle ages was overtly and covertly cataphatic— that is, although it acknowledged the presence of the apophatic (an inability to ever know God in His ultimate transcendental nature) it took a distinctly cataphatic position in regard to the presence of God within the material. That is, it presumed to achieve a knowledge of God obtained through affirmation. The affirmation took the form of extraordinary, expensive, and astonishing works of art (most of which have been lost due to the destruction wrought by iconoclasts during the Reformation and, in the special and especially unfortunate case of France, the French Revolution, which wrought a literal hell on the extraordinary gothic sculpture in many cathedrals.)

Because the philosophers, theologians, priests, ministers, and monks of the Middle Ages — as well as the wealthy patrons who funded them, all of whom were educated enough to understand quite well what they were doing — believed that it was possible to worship God through affirmation, and understood that the relationship between man and God is a deeply inner relationship, inspired by spiritual forces that, though invisible, exert a real effect on the world around us, all of the arts, sciences, architecture, and other cultural activities they engaged in reflected these principles. To investigate and understand the world on God’s behalf was considered to be a sacred duty. Understanding the inner as well as the outer nature of the human being was an equally sacred duty.

It would seem quaint to the average person, today, to believe in such things. We create our own miracles, or so we believe; and we are not so prone to look for the presence of the miraculous in the natural. In a supreme irony, we are increasingly convinced that we will find it on our iPhone screens, one place where it is almost certain to never manifest itself. So when we encounter an object that was, in its own time, meant to convey sacred ideas, principles, and even a sacred presence in its own right, it looks like an artifact to us — something of strictly historical interest, no longer useful in today’s world and to be looked on with a mixture of condescending sympathy, gentle disdain, and an unacknowledged hubris which we apply when examining the relics of all other cultures — especially those which are not Western in nature. It has lost its practical value, its relevance.

We are, in a word, no longer able to have the beliefs that people of the middle ages had; and without those beliefs, it is impossible to see the works of art they did through the same eyes. Only committed esotericists who spend many years studying the inner traditions of faith and religion are likely to begin to come to any inkling of the inner content in these works; and such spiritual sensations and intelligences are not to be found in those obsessed with questions about where things were made, how they were made, or when they were made. Even to ask what they were made for in its most mundane sense is not quite the right question; because the simple fact that something was made to be held up at a church service, or given to a king’s wife for the purposes of prayer, does not get to the heart of the question about why the object exists in the first place.

The point is not that the king’s wife needs a beautiful book to pray from; the point is that the king’s wife feels she needs to pray.

Why does she feel that way?

Now we are at the beginning of a real question about the reasons the art of the middle ages looks the way it does, or even exists at all. The idea that Christ died on the cross for our sins, etc., etc. is far too simplistic; Christianity has, like so many other deep subjects in modern culture, been reduced to a dull kind of stupidity in which people see the symbol of Christ on the cross and think that they instantly understand what is going on, and either mindlessly accept it as a perfect and unquestionable belief— thinking, after all, now being largely out of style in popular culture — or mindlessly reject it as a primitive belief system unbecoming to the mechanistic rationalism which rules today’s technological societies.

Christianity was then, and is still now, a practical method for very deep inquiry into the nature of the human soul. It existed, in point of fact, long before there was a Christ to name it; because the schools that produced the philosophers, the initiates, the mystery cults, the incredibly rich and ancient symbolism of the human enterprise as a whole, have existed since the Stone Age. Dedicated men and women have devoted their thought to the purpose and meaning of the life from within being since that time on; and the last great flowering of that type of inner understanding in Western culture was during the Middle Ages. So when we look back on the art of this period, if we do so without trying to understand the deep inner questions that the cognoscenti of their time used to guide the artistic directions that the money was spent on, we fail to understand the why of the art.

And it is the why that is, in some ways, the most interesting question.

Lee van Laer

Sparkill, 2018

Lee van Laer
Sparkill, Feb. 2018

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