- by Claude Gendron
On April 26th of this year, 12 people gathered at the lovely Cowansville
residence (Eastern Townships, Quebec) recently acquired by our hosts
Marie-Claire and Willem Joubert, local anthroposophists graced with remarkable
kindness and generosity. The reason for this gathering was to take part in a
day of reflection, sharing and conversation on the theme of Vladimir Soloviev’s
Antechrist, for which the chapter
from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
entitled The Grand Inquisitor was
also suggested preparatory reading.
The Dostoyevsky text depicts a cardinal who has taken on the role of
grand inquisitor. This individual positions himself as an adversary of Christ, Who
has reappeared incognito in XVIth century Spain. When Christ performs
the feat of bringing a child back to life, the grand inquisitor’s armed guards seize
Him and throw Him into prison.
The Grand Inquisitor, who has recognized Christ’s true identity, goes to
Him at night in order to declare that it is the institution of the Church that will
bring happiness to mankind. He claims that Christ has failed in in mission –
that the freedom and love He proclaims, spread by the sword and creating discord
among men, are not viable options for humanity, because human beings exhibit
child-like behaviour and therefore need to be led by the hand like children. During
the inquisitor’s lengthy indictment, in which many aspects of present-day
cultural prejudices are made evident, Christ remains silent. The deeds He
performed and the words He spoke at “the turning point of time” are in
themselves an absolute refutation of the accuser’s distortion of His true
message. And yet in spite of the inquisitor’s condemnation, Christ continues to
gaze upon him with love and compassion.
Soloviev’s text depicts an extraordinary individual who has as his
assistant the most powerful magician of the time. The individual in question is
a narcissist of overweening pride and arrogance, and considers himself to be
Christ’s direct successor. He sees himself as the true freer of mankind, born
to bring happiness to human beings. He orders his magician to strike down
anyone who opposes his views, including the latest pope of the Catholic Church,
who refuses to become one of his followers. But in the end Christ returns, with
an army made up of all those who had been sacrificed, in order to extricate
mankind from the Antichrist’s power. This then, in highly condensed form, is the
story told by Soloviev.
Our gathering began with singing led by Arie van Ameringen, and when
this activity had sufficiently warmed our hearts, we were all invited to share
our reflections regarding the prepared reading material. To sum up very briefly
the gist of our conversation: we felt that the texts were directly applicable
to our current social condition and at the same time prophetic for the future
of mankind.
Present-day man is caught in the web of his own cultural habits and
stereotypes, and as such constantly suffers from a general feeling of
dissatisfaction as these values are challenged and called into question on a
daily basis. As long as the human being does not realise that his body, his science,
his culture and his language belong only to the earth and will never satisfy
the needs of his soul and spirit, he will seek the fleeting happiness afforded
by the smoke and mirrors of material things and let himself be seduced by the
infinite number of illusory forms these material things assume.
As a means of salvation for the human soul, art is a precious asset, and
Jean Balekian made this significantly clear as he led us through a living
experience of the beings depicted in the Sculpture of the Representative of
Man, the statue in which Christ is the central figure. By struggling to raise
ourselves to the level of the Spirit-Self, we can reach the etheric Christ and
sense how, even in the sculpted wood of the Statue, He secures the balance
between the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers within us and in the world by repelling them while at the same time holding them in their legitimate places.
As far as the Asuras are concerned, those Spirits of Personality also called
the Spirits of Egoism, they exacerbate and provoke a sort of perversion of the soul by exalting,
among other things, sexuality. And Sorat, the Sun Demon also known in the
Apocalypse as the Two-Horned Beast, though he does not appear in the Statue,
feeds on our lack of understanding and our confusion regarding these retarded
Spirit beings that man will be called upon to redeem at some future time.
The Foundation Stone Meditation can be perceived in the three-fold
structure of the Group. Our life is a path of development, an inner workshop
and sanctuary in which each one carves, modestly, his own personal representation
of the Statue using the forces of his own heart. Thanks to the model of the
Group sculpted by Rudolf Steiner and Edith Maryon, each one of us can remain
awake by perserveringly carving away the wood shavings of our own weaknesses as
we create our own “sculpture”.
The stunning accomplishments of modern technical science, such as great
hydroelectric dams and dizzyingly tall office towers, conceal beneath their
ingenious structural aspects the cold, angular intelligence of Ahrimanic
beings. Indeed, the human skull is where these beings set up their
headquarters. On the other hand, we find the feverish overexcitement of
nationalistic pride which, when taken to the extreme, morphs into terrorism and
fanaticism. Here Luciferic forces project their blinding glare, tempting all
followers of fundamentalist movements into the “black hole” of a never-ending
ascending vortex. Thus, the ego is taken prisoner and the Spirit-Self is tossed
violently back and forth between the heights and the depths, like a beast of
prey being ripped to shreds.
Jean Balekian guided our gaze in such a way as to bring us to perceive
in Christ’s gesture (both repelling
the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers and time holding them in their places) a coming together and harmonious
balancing in the region of the human heart. Jean called on us to contemplate
the love, compassion and moral forces expressed in this central figure of Christ.
We then moved on to a drawing exercise which helped to give outward expression
to our experience of the interpenetrating forces of light and dark; indeed, the
balance between these two elements is a feature of all universal works of art.
After lunch, Andrée Lanthier’s “visible speech” allowed us to refocus
and re-unify as a group. A final drawing exercise, in which we illustrated our
comprehension and our feelings regarding the Statue, revealed the underlying unity
of the sculpture in spite of the multiplicity of its forms. Arie then proceeded
to speak of the seven major forms in which Ahrimanic beings manifest in matter,
after which Marie-Claire Joubert brought the day’s activities to a close by
reciting the last panel of the Foundation Stone Meditation.
A final request was expressed by Andrée Lanthier: that this day’s work
not become lost in some sort of “cosmic vacuum”. She wondered if it would
not be possible to foresee more of these gatherings, to determine time, place,
schedule, and theme. Those who feel moved to continue this impulse should
contact Arie, who agrees to follow up on this request.
Claude Gendron, Candiac, April 28, 2014
1 comment:
Thank-you for taking the time to write about your day, the subject, and the activities. It is inspiring how you prepared, and met, and also worked artistically with the theme.
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