Icons are Cosmic Diagrams

Other worlds exist above our earthly plane. We know this when we look at the stars and we feel it in our hearts. The Christian mystical tradition recognizes this and proposes that we undertake the ascent by stages. A well-known account of the journey is given by Saint John Climacus in the seventh century in his book The Ladder of Divine Ascent.¹ For me, the music of J. S. Bach was the first to alert me to the existence of another realm. Here was evidence of an ordered and perfect world full of truth and meaning and from which we can get messages. This was a personal secret that would keep me sane during years of school and obligatory military service. I had no sense of belonging anywhere but occasionally I would pick up the scent of this secret. There were curious and largely incomprehensible books, old objects of unknown origin in junk shops. I bought an icon of a saint whose calm hieratic regard spoke encouragingly to me from this other world. And then, upon reading Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, everything fell into place.² Like an archaeologist, after many false trails, I had found a lost civilization. 

At the same time the Temple Gallery was making its modest start in a basement under a dry cleaners, and I was reading Maurice Nicoll’s The New Man,³ with Christianity appearing in an entirely new light through his study of its esoteric tradition revealed in symbolism and allegory. I read somewhere that Nicoll was a Neo-Origenist and this plunged me into Origen and the third century.⁴ From there it was a short step to the Gnostics, to the Philokalia⁵ and the great monasteries in Egypt in the sixth century, and to Mount Athos in the tenth. Intermingling with all this was the world of the Neoplatonists and the Enneads of Plotinus.⁶ This was not a curriculum set in a department of religion and philosophy. I had no methodology, but I was on fire, having stumbled into a world of lost knowledge, the Gurdjieff ideas providing the keys to unlock it. There, in fourth century Christian Rome were the Law of Seven, the Law of Three, the Ray of Creation, schools of contemplation and exercises for focusing attention and higher states of consciousness.   

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The art of Christianity in what we call Byzantium, and later in medieval Russia, expressed these ideas in a language of symbolic imagery. Icons showed a world of airy palaces and weightless rocky mountains; dream-like spaces filled with golden light. Here Jesus stands, his presence and understated gesture calling Lazarus out of the cave and death, and there St. George, in a quick movement of light energy taming the dragon. A radiant and perfect world inhabited by Christ and the Virgin attended by ideal beings: saints, prophets, angels, bishops, and spiritual warriors—a world not bound by our laws of space-time or by gravity: shadowless, luminous, immaterial.  

For seekers of truth, Christianity is especially interesting in the period before it became institutionalized. In the first hundred years, Christians were an unknown underground cult only emerging into Roman Society during the second century. Until then it was an oral tradition spreading among disparate groups in Rome, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and very soon in Southern Europe. By “oral” we may understand “silent.” We can understand that truth, in its highest sense, is transmitted between people in a state of inner silence. The Holy Spirit, descending through the Powers and Principalities of the Angelic Hierarchy, meets and co-operates with the person at prayer in conditions of inner stillness. This is the central event of Byzantine and medieval Russian mystical contemplation.⁷ It is the practice known as Hesychasm, from the Greek word hesychia meaning stillness and silence.  

Students of the perennial philosophy see parallels here with the contemplative schools of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, and their derivatives.⁸ Similarly, in the sense of a universal single truth, the proximity of the psychological methods of the Desert Fathers described in the Philokalia, to aspects of Gurdjieff’s inner work have been noted by Ouspensky,⁹ Nicoll,¹⁰ and others. Two of the authors of the first English edition of the Philokalia are Eugenia Kadloubovsky, secretary and close associate of Ouspensky in the 1930s, and Gerald Palmer, a pupil of Ouspensky who later devoted himself to Orthodoxy.¹¹ 

Everything I have read about the intellectual life of early Christianity points sooner or later to the third-century Greek Platonist philosopher Plotinus. Bertrand Russell states that “Christian theologians embodied much of the philosophy of Plotinus and that he is historically important as an influence in moulding the Christianity of the Middle Ages and of theology.”¹² Plotinus came from Hellenic Egypt; he studied Persian and Indian philosophy, eventually settling in Rome under imperial patronage. He practiced the life of a spiritual master so that the cosmological and psychological ideas that he spoke about were the realities of his inner life. His student and biographer Porphyry tells us that “he was able to live at once within himself and for others: he “never relaxed his interior attention,” and, further, that he “maintained an unbroken concentration on his own highest nature.”¹³ Plotinus himself tells us that “philosophy’s task is that of a man who wishes to throw off the shapes presented in dreams, and to this end recalls to waking the mind that is breeding them.”¹⁴ Christian contemplatives, like Gurdjieffians or Buddhists, will recognise this challenge. 

Plotinus’ vision of the graded structure of the heavenly world is known as the “Doctrine of Degrees,” also as “the Great Chain of Being.” The highest stage of the cosmos is God or, in his terminology, the One, or the Absolute. Next comes The Divine Mind, or the Intellectual Principle, then the Universal Soul or the Logos of the Universe. Then come the Archetypes, or the Gods or the Ideas. At the next level are Divine Spirits, or Daimones. Below that comes Mankind and further below, Matter, and the last stage of all, Absolute non-Being.¹⁵ Plotinus continually changes his nomenclature. His definitions are not fixed or static; we sense his mind constantly searching, testing. 

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We come next to Dionysius the Areopagite, whose thought develops from Plotinus and his followers in the fourth and fifth centuries, the period that saw the rise and spread of Christianity, at that time still an essentially mystical movement and not yet the institution we know today. Scholarship refers to him as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in order not to confuse him, as history did for many centuries, with St. Paul’s convert and pupil described in Acts 17:34 who became the first bishop of Athens and who, as far as we know, left no writings. Pseudo-Dionysius lived around 500 ad and is generally regarded as the father of Christian mysticism. His surviving books, The Divine Names, The Celestial Hierarchy, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and Mystical Theology, are the exposition of his Christian Neoplatonism which establishes the framework of Medieval Christian and Byzantine mystical thought, later also influencing Renaissance philosophers. With Dionysus the doctrine of degrees, whether referring to the universe or to levels of human consciousness, is defined as angelic powers. Thus, the human soul rises to God through graded stages or steps, each progressively more spiritual, ascending in the following order: Angels, Archangels, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Dominions, Thrones, Cherubim, and finally, heralding the entry into Paradise, Seraphim. These angelic names can be understood primarily as symbols. Dionysius himself tells us, “No acute mind would have any difficulty at all in finding the correspondence between the visible symbols and the invisible realities.”¹⁶  In his own summary of the now lost Symbolic Theology he states: “We have considered what are the metaphorical titles drawn from the world of sense and applied to the nature of God; what is meant by the material and intellectual images we form of him, or the functions of activity attributed to him.”¹⁷ 

These lists are no more than diagrams, albeit they illustrate powerful ideas, and as diagrams they can be placed side by side, just as Gurdjieff’s diagram of the Ray of Creation can be fitted alongside those of Plotinus and Dionysius. And if we accept that the great laws of nature and the universe are always the same everywhere, it need not surprise us that the world of astrophysics, with its stars, galaxies, local groups, and galaxy clusters, can be squeezed into a comparable set of graded steps, as I show in my presentation.  

Gurdjieff cites the Hermetic formulation “As above, so below’ while stating that ‘Knowledge begins with the teaching of the cosmoses.”¹⁸  The hermetic formulation refers to the universality of knowledge at all levels, as do Christ’s words, “in earth as it is in heaven.”¹⁹ The full quotation from Hermes Trismegistus is “As above, so below; as within, so without; as the soul, so the universe.”²⁰ This idea is expressed in many philosophical systems from the most ancient times and most notably in Plato. It is the basis for understanding the correspondence between the microcosm, the individual human being, and the macrocosm, the universe. The higher and lower stages of the universe correspond to higher and lower states of consciousness; the study of the one is the study of the other. Gurdjieff writes, “At the same time, it is impossible to study man without studying the universe. Man is an image of the world. He was created by the same laws which created the whole of the world. By knowing and understanding himself, he will know and understand the whole world, all the laws that create and govern the world.”²¹ 

The fourth-century father Evagrius states, “Do you wish to know God? First learn to know yourself.”²²  Self-knowledge for the Byzantine monk is central to the practice of Hesychasm. Since the beginning, knowledge of worlds existing beyond sense perception and beyond the rational mind has been taught in schools of contemplation, In the Byzantine era it was the Hesychasts. They were the inner life of the Byzantine and Russian monasteries dedicated to inner silence and continuous prayer. Their dedication and heroic feats of spiritual work revealed to them higher states of consciousness, ecstatic visions of eternity more readily capable of expression in art than in words.  

Gurdjieff’s remark that his work is “esoteric Christianity”²³ is just a crumb falling from the master’s table, in my own case, enough to sustain my Icons and the Mystical Origins of Christianity²⁴and my doctoral thesis, Peter Bruegel the Elder and the Esoteric Tradition.²⁵ 

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It follows from all this that the art of icon painting, originating in part from the schools of Hellenic wisdom in second century Egypt^xxvi and in part from Byzantine Neoplatonism, is a cosmological art. Icons are cosmic diagrams. They give visual form to the struggle of the human soul that seeks to free itself from the lower, from “matter” and “evil” (divinizing them in the process) in order to rise to the higher, to immortality. These forces are continually in movement. The icon of Saint George and the Dragon illustrates the dynamics of the process: the cosmoses, like the psychological levels within us, are not static. The Hesychast, “remembering himself before God,” witnesses the play of active and passive energies; he or she lives the drama. 

My presentation demonstrates that the background of the icon provides the context in the form of the cosmic landscape, laid out according to the Doctrine of Degrees. Against this, the events in the foreground, the “struggle” between the warrior and the dragon, is played out according to the energetic encounter of the higher and lower forces. To us this is theory but to the Hesychast, who operates in the realm beyond theory, beyond the apparatus of words and thoughts, the experience is of the struggle between his or her awakened attention and the habitual tendencies of the mind and the body, all the impulses of the lower self. With the right application of the laws there is no struggle; order and harmony prevail, and nothing is violated. Thus, the image is bold, lucid and supremely confident. Its beauty as a work of art demonstrating balance, proportion, harmony of form and colour, are the qualities of the painter’s own inner life. He is as much a great spiritual master as he is a great master of his craft.