“Vision” W. Zeitler [ORGAN]
Order of Chivalry: Truth & the Knight’s Lance W. Zeitler
In former Music Boxes I’ve discussed the idea of ‘spiritual alchemy’. This is an idea pioneered by Carl Jung (1875-1961) — a titan in the field of psychology. Jung started out as a protégé of Freud (1856-1939), but decisively parted company with him early on. Jung was concerned with what a maximally functioning and healthy psyche looked like — something he thought few truly achieve. The process of getting past all the commercials and slogans and inputs of every sort that we uncritically accept takes at least a lifetime. It’s not that we need to reject everything we’ve been taught and told, rather we can eventually acknowledge the wheat that fits who we really are, and let the chaff blow away. Jung called this process ‘individuation’ — and found in medieval alchemy boundless metaphors for that process.
Critics have asserted that the medieval alchemists weren’t practicing Jungian psychology (of course not!), and that medieval alchemy has nothing to do with spirituality. And yet — although most surviving alchemical treatises read like bizarre recipe books (written in metaphorical code), not all do so. Some read more like strange poetry, or contain nothing but otherworldly images, and aren’t like cookbooks or instruction manuals at all.
With that in mind, I recently came across a rather strange and marvelous book: Aurora Consurgens — the Rising Dawn. By, wait for it — Thomas Aquinas!
When Rome fell (around 476), that put the kibosh on institutions of higher learning and such until Europe really got back on its feet around the 12th century or so. Interest revived in philosophy, and Aristotle in particular was reintroduced to the West by Islamic scholars who had been preserving him all those centuries. Europe found Aristotle’s deductive approach to ‘finding Truth’ electrifying, and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) — one of the finest minds of his day — was tasked with rephrasing Christian theology using Aristotle’s deductive approach. Aquinas bolstered his deductions with citations from Christian, Muslim, Jewish and ‘pagan’ writers. The result was his Summa Theologica in five thick volumes. It’s impact on Christian theology can hardly be overstated.
But he didn’t complete it. In 1273, during a Mass, he had an ecstatic vision, after which he worked no longer on his Summa, breaking off in the middle of his treatise on Penance. “Everything I have written is as straw.” And, “Everything that I have written seems to me worthless in comparison with the things I have seen and which have been revealed to me.”
But apparently he had one last book in him: the Aurora Consurgens — The Rising Dawn. It consists of some opening remarks, followed by seven ‘parables’. Each parable begins with maybe a page of observations on alchemy, followed by a half-dozen or so pages of supporting quotes from Scripture and the Latin Liturgy. The last parable concerns the Song of Songs — a book in the Old Testament describing love that has been a perennial favorite of Christian mystics. The writing is intense — some of the most intense I’ve read by anyone. Reading these parables feels like trying to drink from a fire hose — the author’s mind is truly on fire.
Nervous breakdown? Maybe. But, as I understand it, a mental breakdown is just that — a breakdown in mental functioning, characterized in part by an inability to stay focused on topic, or anything else. The Aurora parables, however, are laser focused.
Others argue that Aquinas didn’t write the Aurora. Perhaps. After all, the style is very different from his Summa. (But it would be, wouldn’t it?) Meanwhile, three of the six versions of the Aurora that have come down to us list Aquinas as the author (the other three don’t identify the author at all). And the parables in particular betray a mind with some knowledge of alchemy (being part of ‘science’ as they understood it, some alchemy would have been part of Aquinas’ general education). The rest of the text betrays a mind-blowing mastery of Scripture and liturgy. I haven’t seen any plausible suggestion of an author besides Aquinas who could manage it.
Not long after his ecstatic vision, Aquinas was journeying to Rome on horseback when he smacked his head on a tree branch, knocking him unconscious. (And presumably knocking him off his horse.) He regained consciousness, but never recovered, dying a month later at age 49.
Perhaps after a lifetime of trying to understand God through deduction and reason — as brilliantly as anyone is ever likely to tread that path — he was granted an ecstatic vision of God that satisfied his life’s True Desire. Perhaps Aurora Consurgens was his attempt to share his life’s consummation. And with that, his life’s quest and task was complete.