reconstruction blurb

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The Reconstruction of the Soul

Esotericisim in Medieval Art in PDF format

$17.99

From the introduction:

My fascination with the art of Hieronymus Bosch has led me, over the years, to seek the sources of his imagery, which, although it has some few precedents, consists of so many obviously extraordinary figures and ideas 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 his paintings 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 and 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.

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