COMMUNICATION - CONSULTANCY - PERSONAL GROWTH - WISDOM TRADITION

AMYDON-EXETER CENTRE 113

   

To Fr Ashley Beck MA, Beckenham
author of >Freemasonry and the Christiian Faith, CTS, 2005:

   

    5 February 2007

    Dear Ashley,

    In Buckfast Abbey on Candlemas day I bought yoour recent CTS pamphlet which I have already also recommended to a friend in this Plymouth diocese. You have compressed a lot of helpful information into a small space.

    In my view among the implications of Aquinas's agere est quodddam pati is the falsity of Augustine and the Church's claim that so callled Pelagianism is a heresy

    Also you didn't notice that Masons don't deny the Craft is "a religion" but they deny it is "a religion".

    Good on this is Giuliano di Bernardo's Marsilio, Venice, 1996 La ricostruzione del Tempio.

   I need not say more here, as my www.beautytruegood.co.uk is clear emough.

   Best wishes and fraternal prayer.

Researching the traditions I+N Tradition and Tradition in all traditions

Primordial Wisdom Re-Membered

 

 

 

Letter to Baroness Williams of Crosby:

COLIN JAMES HAMER

Creativity House - The Rainbow Programme

          UNCOVER~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
          RECOVER~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
          DISCOVER~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~PERSONAL~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~CREATIVITY~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

5 January 2003           THE NEITH NETWORK LIBRARY is currently freely available on-line at:
                  http://www.hagarqim.ndo.co.uk
                  and two other Internet addresses.
                  Each of these websites is dedicated to the Shipwreck
                  of St. Paul and placed under the protection of The Lady of All Nations.

 

Dear Baroness,

I have never forgotten your diligent kindness in facilitating, twenty-five years ago now, the normalisation in professional status of myself and several other full-time members of the then teaching-staff at HMP Wormwood Scrubs.

Your welcome presence in the studio-audience while Archbishop Rowan Williams delivered his recent Dimbleby Lecture assures me that you will not have been distracted from the main thrust of his Gospel message by your related reading of any of the frequently misleading press-reports and commentaries.

Effectively to plead for peace to-day requires much more of us than reading René Daumal's Mount Analogue in a receptive frame of mind and arguing, in the public forum, that serious consideration be given to the claims advanced by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari in their 1986 study, Nomadology - The War Machine.

No authentic world-leader is, in fact, entirely unaware of the truths that Marco Todeschini and myself have adumbrated, and that Professor Vittorio Hess has rather more fully outlined in his Bureaucracy and Well-Being - Towards a non-Western model (Università degli Studi di Camerino, Facoltà di Giurisprudenza, Istituto di Studi Economici e Sociali, Camerino 1994), this latter English translation being that made by Brian Williams, Professor of European History, John Cabot University, Rome.

I enjoy no privileged insight into the mind of President George Bush, but I have been very greatly disturbed at the extent to which Frank E. Peretti's in the U.S.A. best-selling novels, This Present Darkness and Piercing The Darkness (Crossway Books, Wheaton, Illinois, a division of Good News Publishers) communicate a massively unhealthy polarisation of "light" as good and "darkness" as evil, thereby not only completely ignoring but also very seriously obfuscating Carl Jung's and Laurens van der Post's wise insistence on the positive value of the shadow-factor in human affairs. Please move Heaven and Earth to prevent the war now threatening us all.

Shalom!

Dei gratia si quid est:
Col+in
(His Benevolence, The Extra-Reverend Doctor Colin James Hamer
DCH, MRP, STL, PhD, AFPhys (ITEC), DSc - otherwise known as Shivananda
Webmaster (in retirement), Preliminary LibrArian (emeritus) I†N The Neith Network
The Rainbow Programme, Creativity House, 9 Oxford Street, St. Thomas, EXETER, Devon EX2 9AG

 

From the Master I+N The Sacred Page
Creativity House, 9 Oxford Street
St. Thomas, EXETER, Devon EX2 9AG

22 August 2003

Dear Lady Williams,

On 14 May you introduced an enjoyable and potentially very helpful debate on International Order during the course of which the Bishop of Portsmouth quite rightly referred to the Rule of St. Benedict.

Dom Denys Rutledge's The Complete Monk (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), much of it written in solitude in Chile, is more immediately relevant to the concerns of any related Committee than its title suggests. [Check out Chapter 13 "Yet a great way to go" (III Kings XIX, 7), especially pp. 323-4 for the initial clue:

"I foresee a future, not so very distant, when a progressive American university will offer a degree course in the Art of Living. This will appear as the most novel and daring project of the academic world. Men will flock to major in it, and later it will form an inexhaustible quarry for theses for the degree of Ph.D. Then later - but oh, very much later - an original thinker in the depths of the African bush or the remote fastnesses of the Andes, who has resisted successfully the onslaught of civilisation, will add to it the system of an ancient thinker, so producing an Art of Christian Living. Gathering around him a small body of elect, he will initiate them step by step into the mystery. Far away, amidst the eternal snow of the topmost peaks of the Himalayas, the tiny group of Hindus who have escaped equally the march of progress on the plains below and the latest eccentricity of the Communism in their rear, will come to hear of it. They will rise and salute him as an avatar, the living manifestation of the great guru Benedict..."]
Cardinal Gasquet's Introduction to his own published translation of The Rule of Saint Benedict (London: Chatto & Windus, 1936, pp. x-xi) is also most apposite: As a code of laws, "the Rule of St. Benedict has undoubtedly influenced Europe... The monastic plan was similar to the old Roman plan of civilizing by means of 'colonies' planted among the conquered races of the empire. The colonists brought with them the arts, and to some extent the culture, of Imperial Rome, and their mere life lived among the subjugated peoples induced these latter of their own accord to adopt the manners, the language and the law of their conquerors. There was probably no programme, or pretence, but the influence of the life followed by the trained Roman colonist worked its charm without noise or compulsion."

No part of the United Kingdom was ever a Roman colony in precisely that way, and both Europe and the world have debts to Celtic Christianity and to an even older British Church that predate Benedict. I've acknowledged that, and more, on my websites... [where I have also, for your greater convenience,] provided individual links to a few salient texts of mine which do, I feel, have a direct bearing on structural renewal.

With personal best wishes, and thanking you for your magnificent work for true Peace.

Yours sincerely,
H.B. ExtraReverend Doctor Colin James Hamer

Researching the traditions I+N Tradition and Tradition in all traditions

Other Official & Personal Correspondence

Personal Correspondence

Contents

To Anuschka & Leilani Victoria Jordan:

24 January 1994

Dear Anuschka,

Your and Leilani's Christmas Eve Dream Christmas card is among the few I have kept out of the many I was happy to receive. Thank you!

Looking at it again, I am still unsure about the identity of Christmas Eve.... Is she the quietly slumbering well-fed little girl? Or is she the mushroom-liberty-capped winged flying elf-like fairy with the sparkling star-tipped wand? Or is she, perhaps, one of the two identically featured, though differently sized 'dolls' the girl and fairy are each so fondly holding and cherishing? I suspect the latter is the case, but you or Leilani must, please, enlighten me.

I am delighted to hear you have entered upon a new relationship. My own ideal of a gentleman is (and I am quoting what a nun once said of the poet and novelist Charles Williams) a person by whom intimacy is invariably offered but never imposed. I am sorry, therefore, that love of communication has sometimes made me guilty of 'psychic trespassing'.

As a therapist, no matter whether your clients be women or men, I believe you would do well to purchase, or at least borrow Helen M. Luke's Kaleidoscope, details of which are included in my The Way of Woman IN Today's World. I enclose a copy, as I don't remember sending you one already. I hope you find it helpful in both your life and work.

Some of Helen's pages taught me lessons I might not have been willing to learn from a less mature writer, but she was gentle as well as wise in her eighty-eighth year, and so her Kaleidoscope is a book I especially treasure; it so beautifully and sensitively complements the meticulous austerities of another favourite of mine, Father Bernard Lonergan's Insight - A Study of Human Understanding (Longmans, 1957).

Indeed, reading it carries my mind back to the days before the Second Vatican Council, and to the feelings I had whenever the sequence from the Funeral Mass was chanted or recited - and I am thinking especially of the fifth stanza:

  • Liber scriptus proferetur - Then shall written book be brought,
  • In quo totum continetur - Showing every deed and thought,
  • Unde mundus judicetur - From which judgment will be sought.

Or, as the Missale Anglicanum translates:

  • Lo! the book exactly worded,
  • Wherein all hath been recorded,
  • Thence shall judgment be awarded.

Today, however, if you will kindly share a moment with me, I would prefer to show you just a few beautiful gems from among the many woven into the rich tapestry of Helen Luke's inspiring text (in wich context they naturally resonate much more fully than I may properly expect them to do here):

  • "A dream came to Orual at this time. It reproduced the first task of Psyche in the myth - the sorting of the seeds. In it she sat before an immense pile of mixed seeds which must be sorted before morning. Failure would bring disaster, and she knew in her dream that success was humanly impossible. Near despair, she nevertheless set to work - and then in her dream she saw herself as a tiny ant carrying a seed on her back and staggering under the weight of it. Not until the end was she to realize that it was the work of the ants which enabled Psyche to succeed.
  • Her book was, of course, the sorting of the seeds - the immensely painful task of discrimination, of complete honesty, as far as she was capable of it, about the thoughts, feelings, and actions of her life. It is the first necessity of the way to consciousness for women." (p.60)
  • "Surely the meaning of the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus, is that there is no salvation without experience of the mystery. It became a cruel and bigoted statement when it was interpreted in the literal outer sense (a kind of interpretation which all the great dogmas of the Church have suffered immeasurably), and it gave sanction to such horrors as the Inquisition. The ecumenical movement today is tackling this distortion on its own level with arguments of reason and good sense, but it misses the essential point, which is that man should recognize and experience the level of his being where this dogma is eternally and individually true. Outside the 'Church', outside the mystery, there is no salvation.
  • When the outer cult loses its mana - its spiritual force or power - for a man, then the mystery falls into the unconscious and must there be rediscovered by the individual journeying alone in the dark places to the experience of the symbols within..." (pp. 31-2.)
  • "In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings... Theoden, King of the Mark,... refuses Eowyn, his niece-daughter, permission to go with the Riders.... Eowyn, like all awakened women since this century began, knows that if she accepts this platitude any longer and refuses to stand by her certainty that she has the courage and the ability to 'wield a sword', then her creative spirit will wither and die, and despair will finally destroy her. It is absolutely essential for Eowyn at this point that she defy the father's authority - as it became essential for modern woman to rebel and to disobey and to enter the arena of the male-dominated world. And at first, like Eowyn, in order to free themselves, they have been compelled to disguise themselves as men - and many have come to imagine that there really is no difference any more. They forget they are disguised and so identify with the emerging spirit.
  • It is, however, precisely at this point in the story, that Eowyn's repressed and despised femininity begins to assert itself from her unconscious. It is the crucial moment for every woman who is driven by the creative spirit into the Logos world. Will she imitate man, in which case her spirit will turn sterile and demonic; or will she, in the midst of her intoxicating freedom, be true to her basic nature? If she chooses the latter then indeed she may come at infinite cost to confront and destroy that fell wraith, riding on the beast of cruelty and greed, who yields to no power but that of the true woman who has dared to grasp the sword of the spirit." (pp. 33-6.)
  • "It is no longer enough for woman to act instinctively as a link to the wisdom in the unconscious for man. We have drifted so far away from this wisdom into sterility that an instinctive return means the all-too familiar fall into violence and sensuality. What an image it is - the black terror of the Ringwraith riding an obscenely horrible beast! Therefore the woman must not simply 'know' the spirit (instinctively and unconsciously as in the past), but - to quote Charles Williams' telling phrase - must 'know she knows', and so she consciously takes up the sword to slay both beast and wraith so that the shadow may pass and man may remember in his heart as well as his head the undying spark over which defeat and death have no power. And she must do this as woman, not at all in imitation of man. If she falls into this imitation, then her sword thrusts become mere pinpricks which succeed only in wounding the masculinity of the men [and children] around her...." (p.40.)
  • "The 'oughts' and 'shoulds' of the animus are in fact a passionate feminine possessivness.
  • This then is the Great Offering - the giving of that which is most loved to the god who is as yet unknown. A woman makes this offering when she is willing to risk the loss of a relationship rather than make possessive demands on the person loved. A man makes it when he will sacrifice his achievements in the world rather than betray his deeper values. To both that offering brings the experience of Eros, the god of Love...." (p.49.)
  • "In its more ancient and deeper meaning a virgin is a woman who, whether she has had intercourse or not, has no need to unite physically with a man in order to become whole, one-in-herself, for she has known intercourse with the god within. This has always been the symbolic meaning of the life of a nun. As the bride of Christ, she seeks the inner marriage of the human and the divine. It is easy, however, to see how the affirmation of a vocation to prayer and contemplation can sink into the negative repression of the sexual desires themselves. Chastity, which means purity of heart, has come all too frequently to mean a denial of the purity of instinct itself. No one can become 'virgin' in the true sense without going through the fire of instinctual emotion. This experience, however, does not necessarily include fruition on the physical level, and the time has surely come not only for a resurrection of the true meaning of the word 'virgin' but for a return of respect for those whose inner truth may demand virginity in the ordinary physical sense." (pp. 78-9.)
  • "Charles Williams, who died in 1945, was one of the great recreators of the Grail myth in our century....In 'Taliessin in the Rose Garden' (from The Region of the Summer Stars, Oxford University Press, 1950)... as Taliessin looked on the stricken world, he heard:

The women everywhere throughout it sob with the curse

and the altars of Christ everwhere offer the grails.

Well are women warned from serving the altar

who by the nature of their creature, from Caucasia to Carbonek,

share with the Sacrifice the victimization of blood.
  • The woman's monthly shedding of blood is the outer sign and an inner symbol of her female capacity to give birth. Williams means, I believe, that the menstrual blood of woman is a continual reminder of the truth that after the Fall, after the split in creation, there can be no 'return', no healing of the split, without sacrifice, without the giving of blood. If the woman or the feminine in man does not 'bleed', there is no creation in this world. Therefore, he says that women 'share with the Sacrifice the victimization of blood.' The piercing of Christ's side was the wound in the heart of his feeling nature. (The liver was thought by the ancients to be the seat of the emotions and is on the right side).
  • I do not know any other writer, theologian, or psychologist who has given this very profound, yet very simple and, once seen, obvious explanation of the intuitive revulsion which many feel at the thought of a woman priest celebrating the Mass. If a truly mature woman, fully aware of her animus (the masculine aspect of her unconscious) were to read services and preach sermons, it would not offend. The Mass, however, is a symbolic rite, and no matter how developed her spirit may be a woman remains biologically female. Since her shedding of blood, says Williams, is in her flesh an equivalent of the blood of the victim, therefore, if in her flesh she offers the blood of Christ, she usurps on the wrong level the function of the spirit. 'Flesh knows what spirit knows,' Williams goes on, 'but spirit knows it knows.' In this, of course, he is emphatically not saying that individual women cannot know they know; indeed he goes on to show this with great clarity. He is speaking only of her symbolic feminine role in a ritual, not of her individual being. A symbol is, of course, that which makes one the two levels of reality - spirit and matter, inner and outer truth....
  • During the Second World War, I lived in a small village in Berkshire... where a local woman... told me she never tried to make jams during the days of her menstrual period since it was well known to be useless; the jam or jelly simply would not set! In other words, no transformation could take place at these times: the separate ingredients, the fruit and sugar, could be mixed, but could never transform into the third thing - that which is both and neither. The relevance to the transformation of the bread and wine on that other level of the Mass is plain. Projected onto such things as the making of jam, it may seem nonsensical in the light of our scientific knowledge, but the ancient symbolic truths which express the mysteries of being have always been preserved both in folklore and in the rituals of the great religions.
  • Though in the ancient world there were everywhere priestesses, they were never, I believe, charged with the actual killing of the sacrificial animal or offering its blood. The tearing to pieces of victims by the women in the Dionysian rites was not a priestly act but a ritually contained release of instinctual frenzy. The priestesses served as links to the unconscious through their mediumistic power - the sibyls, for instance - they tended the sacred fire, as did the vestal virgins, fulfilling the great religious functions of woman; but they did not wield the knife of sacrifice or offer the blood. Rather it is their task to draw up the waters under the earth from the well of the unconscious that all may drink of the aqua permanens, as the alchemists called the water of life. It is the measure of the masculine one-sidedness of our culture that there have never been priestesses of this kind in institutional Christianity.
  • It would be useless for the Church at this stage to attempt to introduce new rituals for priestesses. A true rite is born, not made, and if consciously contrived is merely sentimental. Nor does the answer lie in the current urge to admit women to the priest's role. Nevertheless, we cannot put the clock back in a mood of nostalgia. In most Protestant sects, the communion service is not a symbolic transformation rite but a commemorative meal, so that there should be no objection whatever to women ministers. Only to the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican rites do the words of Charles Williams apply. But the demand for women in the priesthood is perhaps one of the indicators that for growing numbers of people the symbolic life is slowly being pushed out of the collective institutions as such. In the coming age, as Jung frequently pointed out, the symbols must come to birth in the individual soul, in the man or woman who enters on the lonely quest for the Grail within, and this applies to church members as profoundly as to anyone else. It was always in the legends a quest that must be undertaken alone, but it is never achieved without the discovery of objective relatedness to others, as opposed to the all-too-easy unconscious 'mixing', or the 'togetherness' which submerges any true meeting between human beings." (pp.74-81.)
  • "In Richard Wagner's massive Ring of the Nibelungs cycle... in the opera, Götterdämmerung... the circle of wholeness and the Ring of Alberich are basically one and the same - the positive and negative poles of the Self. That which determines the nature of the power bestowed by the Ring is the degree of consciousness with which each and every one of us responds to that love which is both 'centre and circumference'. He who has reached the stage of 'Love and do what you will' is completely free from any temptation whatsoever to use the Ring whether for good or evil purpose....
  • The Ring can only be forged by a man who has renounced love. This is true both of the Ring of world domination and the circle of wholeness, though in opposite senses. The seeker after the truth of love, just as the seeker after personal power, can only find the gold through the experience of his passionate, instinctive nature, and from this experience he learns that when his desire is purged of all possessiveness, all demand, he will be able to forge the Ring of wholeness. For him this purging of eros is the way to that love which is beyond desire, the love of which Jung is speaking when he says that only when a man can renounce any and every desire without a moment's hesitation has he found the Self. Nevertheless, only through desire can desire be transcended.
  • For Alberich, on the other hand, the renunciation of love means the total rejection of all the feminine values of relationship, of all tenderness and kindness, of all respect for the individual - a total exclusion of all but his own will.
  • In our own time, we see this murder of eros values on every side. It reveals itself in the deification of the collective 'good', so-called, and the justification of every conceivable horror in its service.... Wherever we see a demand that things should go our own way; whenever we try to push people into behaving in the way we imagine to be right, we are forging the eros gold into a Ring of personal exclusive power." (pp.90-2.)
  • "Disobedience to authority, at the right moment, is the essential of any and every breakthrough of new awareness; disobedience with a condition, however. It is senseless and meaningless rebellion if it is not inspired by a real devotion to a conscious value and if there is not complete willingness at the same time to suffer the consequences, whatever they may be." (p.96.)
  • "Siegfried spends one night with Brunhilde, and then he leaves her to prove himself as a man, giving her the Ring to keep as a pledge of his love. This gift is the certain proof that Siegfried values love, undifferentiated though it still is for him, above power. The weakness and sin into which he now falls are not therefore a basic betrayal, they are a failure to grow through the personal romantic love into that other love which includes and transcends it. The gift of the Ring to his personal love shows indeed his freedom from the power drive, but it also symbolizes his unconscious identification of his beloved with the totality, and his failure to take up the real responsibility of consciousness. This is the experience through which all young men of generous heart must pass when they fall in love. Then come the years of learning how to withdraw the projection without rejecting their love. And most, like Siegfried, must regress before the vital breakthrough to consciousness can be made. It comes to Siegfried only at the moment of his death.
  • In Brunhilde, too, the same pattern is clear. Warned by one of her Valkyrie sisters that if she does not part from the Ring it will bring disaster on gods and men, she refuses to listen. The Ring is Siegfried's pledge of love and nothing else matters. Her personal love is the whole to her - no other vaue can possibly transcend it, and to women this is a more frequent danger than to men. Nevertheless, until a man or a woman has passed through this overwhelming experience of personal love in some form or other, he or she does not even set foot on the way to individuation. Nothing can be sacrificed - that is, transformed, made holy, purged of personal demand - unless it has first been fully possessed." (pp. 100-1.)
  • "In its essence, friendship is the capacity for absolute trust in another as person, involving a complete honesty with oneself which is extremely hard to attain. At this level it has nothing to do with like or dislike of another's qualities, with agreement or disagreement, or with frequency of contact. It dies if one covers over the qualities in another which one dislikes or exaggerates the things one likes in him. It is killed by any kind of demand, or by such thoughts as 'she will be hurt if I don't do what she wants, so I must consent no matter what other values are involved'; equally damaging is the opposite point of view, 'my own values are always more important than his or her feelings.' In relationship there are no rules, only basic guiding lines, and each tiny situation must be met as something unknown in which we must seek reality and love through a new effort of discrimination...." (p.154.)
  • "Julian of Norwich in her Revelations of Divine Love affirmed that no one can seek God who has not already found Him." (p.156.)
  • "The voice within... is speaking less and less in the language of collective institutions or through external rules of morality, and more and more in the individual soul.... The outgrowing of all collective answers exposes men and women to the equal and opposite blindness of 'individualism'. Everywhere we see a woolly-minded tolerance, or else rebellion for its own sake breeding again its opposite - a complete disregard of the values of the individual and a new kind of total authority. However unconscious of it one may be, everyone's need is to find the totality - the wholeness - that is God. The more we are cut off from the symbolic life, through which alone we may approach and reconcile the opposites, the greater the danger of our projection of this reality onto totalitarianism of one kind or another. The total authority of the Church is replaced by the total authority of unbridled instinct and we have the spectacle of the grandeur of the free spirit of the individual reduced again to a conformity, this time devoid of all meaning.
  • In the midst of these growing dangers, it is alarming to see the failure of the Church to respond with vision and guidance. It will be said that all the churches are vibrating with new voices, and this is true; but what are they saying? Instead of reasserting the eternal values of the interior and the symbolic life in the individual, they appear to be joining in the flight from these truths which it is the whole function of a church to maintain....
  • If their lives are not to dissolve into the meaningless, individuals in ever-increasing numbers will be forced by the breakdown of laws and by the rationalization of collective myth to seek, each within himself or herself, the contemplative vision....

R.H. Blyth, in the preface to his book, Zen in English Literature and the Oriental Classics, now out of print, quoted Confucius' definition of a teacher: 'A true teacher is one who knows and makes known the New by revitalizing the Old.' " (p.171-9.)....

 

 

To Zecharia Sitchin: 

25 January 1994

Dear Zecharia,

Are We Alone? reached me here on Thursday, 20 January, and I have so far viewed it twice. Your kind good wishes inscribed in a copy of your When Time Began arrived next day, and I have now completed my first reading.

The video does you more justice than the photograph on the dust-jacket of the hardback editions of your books, and I have no doubt you still enjoy the zest and energy needed to advance to further literary triumphs in the not too distant future.

Obviously the actual pin-pointing of the present whereabouts of Planet X, Nibiru, by astronomers would be one occasion that might inspire you to produce an additional volume. However, while I certainly have faith that prayer, perhaps ritualised in some form of kabbalistic theurgical operation, may help in bringing that day into our present, I suspect that you are as yet unable to name the date?

My initial impression of your fascinating and important writing is that you have chosen to keep within quite a tightly contained frame of reference and also to paint with a fairly broad brush. On first reading, I also find your books repeat themselves and overlap with each other much more than most other works I have read, and to a greater degree than I immediately find congenial.

On the other hand, I recognise that repetition helps, especially when unfamiliar topics are being discussed in some profoundly novel way, and so I have no doubt that you and your editors have established the right balance and struck the right note. Indeed, reflection on your work teaches me that the time is ripe for me to repeat myself rather more than I have done hitherto.

I am also very much aware that, relatively detailed as your bibliographies are, there are undoubtedly at least as many studies again that you have read or at least consulted, but have felt it better not explicitly to mention.

For all these reasons, I appreciate that any comments or criticisms in which I choose to indulge are unlikely to have any relevance to you as an experienced professional writer of renown, knowing your audience and knowing your market as well as your own aims and objectives.

But since you are my kinsman in our human family before you are a writer, I am venturing to make a few observations about When Time Began in particular, first of all as a token of my own appreciation for your most valuable work, but also in the hope that something of what I say make prove to be of benefit to you...

Since last I wrote, I have also added another 4 pages of dates to my A Spiral Quest, but they may not be of any interest to you, since they all fall between 43 A.D. and 1470, and refer to the true history of King Arthur. I have, however, also adjusted my date for Stonehenge Phase 1 from "3100" to "3100-2300 (2800?)", and modified my 4,000,000,000 entry to make it clear that our Moon derives from Nibiru rather than Tiamat. This, of course, fits it much better with what Don Wilson says in the book of his I mention under 1976.

Re When Time Began: "It is said that Augustine of Hippo..." (p.2). Your opening turn of phrase is somewhat whimsical. Since Augustine's Confessions have never been out of print from the invention of printing until the present, and are readily available in all major languages, surely even a closer to average reader than I am would benefit from being informed that you are quoting him direct. Given the importance of time in your book, the inclusion of the Confessions in your list of sources would also not go amiss.

As J.D. Solomon, who has both an M.A. a Ph.D. in Geology and a Ph.D. insists in The Mind's Ear, although neither he nor I object to your choosing to write: "Though we know not what Time is, we have found ways to measure it" (p.2), since language is always a muddle, strictly speaking, as Aristotle's classical definition of Time agrees, we never do measure Time - (1) because Time is not itself a measurable "it", but rather the measure of motion; (2) because, just as measure is not really measure but measuring, so time is not really time but timing, i.e., an aspect of those rhythms, resonances and pulsations which together express life in process.

Your way of telling a story is, however, fine, as far as it goes. As you notice, I have other fish to fry! The closing paragraph of The Way of Woman... has already alerted you to my priority interest in the Word. I was interested to learn from Giovanni Filoramo's A History of Gnosticism (Blackwell, 1992) that for some 2nd-century gnostics 'The Sun is the Voice of the Moon; the Moon is the Name of the Sun'. That resonates.

"Is the present part of the past or the beginning of the future?" (p.6) My preferred question instead is: Is the past part of the actual present and the future part of our present possibilities? My short answer is: Yes! An approximation to my more complete answer soon has me quoting, e.g., the Introit from the beginning of the Catholic Mass for Christmas day: "The Lord said: you are my son; this day have I begotten you." Time always begins now, because it is the present that is given us, a gift - ambiguous, of course, since the English equivalent of the French cadeau may prove to be a German Gift of poison. But all this, as a linguist yourself, you already know.

The second revised edition of George Steiner's After Babel - Aspects of Language & Translation (Oxford University Press, 1992), although an excellent book I enjoy immensely, makes no specific reference to Sumerian, and sheds but a meagre light on the problem of time. Pages 164-5 are the most relevant:

  • "The difficulty arises when we ask whether and to what degree actual linguistic practice determines or is determined by underlying time-schemes.... C. von Orelli's Die hebraeischen Synonyma der Zeit und Ewigkeit genetisch und sprachvergleichend dargestellt of 1871 marks the beginning of methodical attempts to relate grammatical possibilities and constraints to the development of such primary ontological concepts as time and eternity.... If, in Semitic languages, 'the notion of recurrence coincides with that of duration', which came first: the lexical and grammatical rule or the mental picture, with its primordial but likely source in conjectures on the orbital motion of the stars?."

Steiner's own quotation is from Thorlief Boman's Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (London, 1960), and a related footnote also mentions John Marsh's The Fullness of Time (London, 1952). I don't know whether or not you have ever contemplated writing about your life's work in a context that would properly include these sorts of considerations, but I for one would enjoy reading such a study. I lag far behind Steiner and yourself in linguistic attainment, but remain willing to learn.

On the other hand, when it comes to the philosophy of language, in collaboration with J.D. Solomon I have worked out a few things Steiner seems not to have sufficiently noticed... [What followed was a direct quotation from pages 5-8 of my J.D. Solomon Reflects on our Use and Misuse of Language and Logic.]

I used smaller type for that quotation not to strain your eyes nor to economise on paper, but to make it easier to skip over it to matter more immediately related to When Time Began as you have actually chosen to have it published and distributed.

But before doing that in detail, let me mention an observation Rufus C. Camphausen makes in his The Divine Library (Inner Traditions International, 1992, p.36). He states that the only available English translation of the Gilgamesh Epos does not include the twelfth tablet, so far available only in either a French edition or in an unpublished Dutch version by G. Meuleman. Perhaps something ought to be done about this soon? More beginners' classes in ancient languages are, of course, needed as a basis from which progress may be hoped for.

On page 10 of When Time Began you refer to Hamlet's Mill. Peter Tompkins' Secrets of the Great Pyramid (1st edition, 1971; HarperColophon edition, 1978) includes (pp.287-382) an important Appendix by Livio Catullo Stecchini, who writes (p.289-91):

  • "About ten years ago I exchanged manuscripts with Hertha von Dechend, who was then beginning to write her book Hamlet's Mill. As an expert of ancient cosmology, she raised a strong objection to the fact that I would discuss length, volume, and weight for hundreds of typewritten pages, without ever mentioning time, whereas the ancients were dominated by the preoccupation with cosmic time, with the movement of the vault of heaven....
  • Although I recognize that astronomical measurements are extremely important, I have always been wary of dealing with them, because studies of ancient astronomy have become cluttered with metaphysical and theological doctrines. My opposition to the view that the ancients lived in a world of fantasies or even of outright hallucinations... is such that, after years of dealing with all sorts of measurements, I still feel most at ease with agrarian measures in cuneiform tablets, rates of money exchange in Greek inscriptions, or the volume of jars in papyri from Egypt. Yet the techniques of land surveying used in Mesopotamia are a key to the understanding of how the ancients mapped the sky....
  • In the course of discussing with me the geometry of the Great Pyramid, Tompkins explained how... a second of time in the motion of the vault of heaven corresponds to a definite length on earth. For me this was a Galilean revolution in that it permitted me to see ancient astronomy in terms of observational techniques based on measurement, rather than systems based on the theological persuasions or the psychological projections of the modern investigators."

The whole book, not only Stecchini's Appendix, merits attention, and while my own preference is to interpret observational techniques, theological persuasions and psychological projections as mutually complementary rather than as rival procedures, I have no doubt that your native character inclines you, as mine inclines me to empathise closely with Stecchini's stated position.

Another work by Peter Tompkins well worth looking at is Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids (Thames & Hudson, 1976) To mention just one point, from page 256 onwards, discussing the number 129,600 and its submultiples: 1728, 864, 720, 432, 360, 216, 180, 90, 60, 40, 36, 24, 20, 16, 12, 10, 8, 5, 4 & 2, and also the number 7, he says much that is relevant to your own areas of interest, and I found his discussion (p.301 onwards) of that "extraordinarily high number 195,955,200,000,000 which appears on one of the 30,000 Babylonian cuneiform tablets found in Assurbanipal's Nineveh library" rivetting. Since 1,959,552 = 432 x 432 x 10.5, the tie-in with your own discussion of 432,000 is a close one.

On page 12 you quote Psalms (90:4). J.D. Solomon and I are also inclined to read "a precise mathematical formula" into St. Peter's New Testament gloss on the same passage, II Peter (3:8;Heinz W. Cassirer's translation):

  • "However, my well-loved friends, there is one thing you must ever be mindful of, that with the Lord a day can mean a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day."

Where Solomon and I differ, is that I also suspect that St. Peter's "and" may, sometimes at least, need to be taken as implying a strict conjunction, and not just as expressing an alternative possibility!

The astrophysical discussion throughout your books is conducted in such a way as to suppose acceptance of Einstein's well known E = MC2 being so interpreted that the speed of light always remains constant. I believe the Annunaki benefitted from knowing something else that, I strongly suspect, Einstein also knew, and which Bruce Cathie explains and discusses interestingly and relevantly in, for instance, The Pulse of the Universe - Harmonic 288 (Sphere Books, 1981, pp. 25 onwards), where he simplifies the above equation by replacing the enigmatic M (mass) by what it most probably represents, viz., C + the square root of 1/C.

Since C is always, for Cathie, to be calculated in fractions of degrees, ancient mathematics was ideally placed to handle the numbers involved. Also, since 288 happens to be, as I understand, the value by gematria of the Hebrew verb (merachepet) that mentions the Spirit's vibrantly protective hovering over the as yet formless Void in Genesis 1:2 (cf. Gordon Strachan, Christ and the Cosmos, Labarum Publications, Dunbar, 1985, pp. 71-3), you will readily appreciate my sensing that this number affords us a precious key in our efforts to understand that that is.

Whereas (p.13) you claim that "The 'myth' of Divine Ages thus appears to be based on scientific facts," I nowadays prefer to insist that while all 'facts' are, as their name (facta) implies, constructs, any 'scientific facts' worth holding on to are also somehow based on, or better, rooted in living myth. This is currently, an appropriate adverb, the direction of my work, which I regard as being complementary to, not as opposed to your own - which today's public are, of course, already much more prepared to open their minds to.

That is not, however, a valid reason for overrating scientific methods. You state (p.15): "the causes of the Earthly Time cycles of day, month, year are not self-evident and required advanced scientific knowledge to be realized."

Brian Byng's Dartmoor's Mysterious Megaliths (Baron Jay Ltd) "is intended to be an introduction to the Megalithic sites on Dartmoor in the light of the remarkable theories of Professor Alexander Thom, and the Science of Astro-Archæology which has now become respectable because of his many years of meticulous and accurate research in Britain & Brittany" (p.2). As well as explaining how quite a number of the Dartmoor remains are of set-ups permitting, among other things, "accurate tracking of the moon" and "eclipse prediction" "two hundred years before the Egyptian pyramids of the Old Kingdom" (pp. 16-20), he agrees (p.13) that -

  • "The full moon always rises opposite the sunset and sets opposite the sunrise. In winter when the sun is rising and setting near its most southerly limits, the full moon is rising and setting for month after month on its most northerly limits. At a time when daylight lasts around eight hours, the full moon is giving a bright light for 16 hours each night. This fact would soon be noticed by people who lived outdoors and kept track of the sun and moon. The moonlight would have been useful for travel by land and sea or for construction work outside the main crop raising season."

In other words, "advanced scientific knowledge" is not always required and, incidentally, when it is, it may not always be precisely of the sort you bring to bear to your own study of Stonehenge. Since we both know that C. Chippindale's Stonehenge Complete (1983) falls very far short of its title, I shall not labour this point, nor, indeed, do I wish to fault you for not writing a book you did not wish to attempt to write, but I will cite three relevant passages from Guy Underwood's The Pattern of the Past (first published 1969; Abacus Sphere Books edition, 1972, reprinted 1974). The author died in 1964, aged 81.

"Modern architects think in terms of rectangles. If they did not do so they would be regarded as incompetent, and it is difficult to imagine a modern church being designed with a bend in the nave, as at Southwark Cathedral, and at Henbury Church, near Bristol; or with the chancel or Lady chapel on the skew, as in numerous old churches.... At Chichester Cathedral there is hardly a line that is straight, any two lines that are parallel, or any angle that is a right-angle.... Any suggestion that the men who constructed the old churches and cathedrals could not build straight walls or construct true right-angles is manifestly absurd. Why, then, did they... decide whether a chancel should be twisted to the north or to the south, and to what degree?...." (p.161)

"As the finest and most elaborate prehistoric monument of its kind, Stonehenge might be expected to provide the best example of the relation of prehistoric building to the geodetic system. Accordingly, my main researches were concentrated there.... A great many geodetic lines converge upon and emerge from the central site. Their number greatly excees that of any other site I have prospected.... The great majority of these lines are multiple aquastats, most of which run in pairs...." (p.102)

"Most of the authorities consider that the Great Stone Circle consisted originally of thirty upright stones. Seventeen only of these remain standing, with only six lintels.... There are no other situations where standing stones could have been placed at the same radius and complying with the same geodetic conditions. This throws great doubt upon the theory that there was once a complete circle of standing stones.... Lintels exist only at places where there are two or more blind springs or nodes between two standing stones..., in all other spaces there is only one blind spring. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the purpose of the lintels is to mark such places, and that there were never more than six.... Stone 11 is on the same radius as the other stones of the Great Circle. However, it is shorter, narrower, and thinner than the others, and could not have supported a lintel. This is additional evidence that there can never have been a continuous line of lintels...." (pp. 110-12)

Obviously, in treating a subject as vast as yours for the benefit of the general reader, including the specialist in less ancient knowledge, you do well in your early books to paint with a broad brush, but I am hopeful that some of these brief indications may, nevertheless, either help you in your future writings, or provide suggestions about the production of interesting future video-films. (I was, of course, pleased to hear the unexpected references to Exeter towards the end of Are We Alone?)

On page 14, referring to the 7 'days' of creation, you write: "hopefully, even Fundamentalists will by now agree that these were not day and night such as we now know them."

One Fundamentalist who would greatly benefit from knowing your work is Bonnie Gaunt, 510 Golf Avenue, Jackson, Michigan 49203 (Tel: 517-784-3605), author, publisher, and distributor from that address of Stonehenge... A Closer Look (1979, reprinted 1987), The Magnificent Numbers of the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge (1985, reprinted 1988), and The Stones Cry Out - God's Best Kept Secrets Hidden In Stone (1991). This latter includes a chapter about the so-called 'Stone of Destiny' currently housed in the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey and, as you no doubt know (I noticed your reference to the meaning of "Elizabeth"), by many believed to be "the pillow used by Jacob when he had his dream of the angels at Bethel." (o.c., p. 72)

I know she doesn't agree with much that Bodvar Schjelderup writes in favour of, and gives one the first impression of being obstinate in her belief that Noah's son was, under divine guidance, the architect of both Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid, and that, e.g., the Great Flood covered the Earth in 2,473 B.C., when ante-diluvian man had lived for a total of 1,656 years, but I have reason to believe this seeming obstinacy is underpinned by two perfectly reasonable considerations: (1) without some over-arching integrating hypothesis, it is difficult for an imaginative artist to weld meaningfully together a multitude of literary, archaeological and other presumed facts; (2) granted the longevity of Bible-based belief-systems and the relative brief span for which any new scientific theory is in fashion, the lone researcher has little to gain and much to lose by struggling to adjust to each passing wind of scientific change. Also because the passage of time opens some of us to wider horizons, I hope that she would welcome some contact with your good self. Her bibliographies include references to Gerald S. Hawkins (who happened to call Stonehenge "a gaunt ruin"), to Fred Hoyle (who, you may like to know, rather likes J.D. Solomon's work), to Flinders Petrie, Peter Tompkins, the Encyclopedia Judaica, R.J.C. Atkinson, R.S. Newall - in other words, she is a serious student, even if a Fundamentalist who has not yet quite faced up to the fundamentals!

On page 24 you discuss 'precession', a topic which recurs on other pages as, indeed, also in your earlier books, but on the page mentioned you identify "the complete Precessional Cycle" as one of 25,920 years, and also suggest that "the Anunnaki arrived at the Golden Ratio of 6:10."

Pages 206-6 of my unpublished The Rainbow Cymbal include the following passage:

  • "The plane of the Moon's orbit round the Earth only approximating that of the Earth's orbit around the Sun at present, the Moon's attraction on the bulging equator of the tilted Earth seeks to bring it 'upright'. The effect is to cause the Earth's axis to describe a slow circle against the background of the heavens, each cycle taking 25,785 years.
  • The figure just quoted was valid in A.D. 1942; in 3000 B.C. the corresponding figure would have been 26,280 years; in about A.D. 50 it was 26,000 - in other words the overall duration of the cycle of the vernal point's precession through the twelve sites of the sky designated zodiacally by their dominant constellations is currently decreasing by about 11.4 years every century."

Although my personal library, including pamphlets and magazines, now contains only about 700 items, I am pretty sure the above information is based on one or other of R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz's books no longer in my possession.

As regards the Golden Ratio, pages 1072-3 of The Rainbow Cymbal include the following:

  • "I spent Tuesday and Wednesday, 24-25 April 1984, at Huntington Castle in the village of Clonegal, just north of Enniscorthy, as the guest of Baron Ruadh of Strathloch and his sister, Olivia Robertson, who are cousins of Robert Graves.
  • Their father had been highly thought of as an architect, and Olivia showed me a long article he had published, crammed full of quite complex mathematical formulae, in which he had discussed the proportions of the famous Golden Section in connection with Sir Christopher Wren's designs for St Paul's Cathedral, and had calculated it to, I think, twelve places of decimals.
  • I was delighted to share with her a very short computer program I had shortly before written in BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), and which achieves an accuracy as far as 16 places of decimals, generating, in other words, a quotient of 0.6180339887498949.
  • Readers familiar with BASIC may like to try out this program for themselves:

  • 10 A£=0

    20 B£=0

    30 LPRINT a£"/"B£"="A£/B£

    40 LPRINT TAB(30) B£"/"(A£+B£)"="B£/(A£+B£)

    50 A£=A£+B£

    60 B£=A£+B£

    70 IF A£>5550000000000000£ THEN END

    80 GOTO 30

  • I had also included in my original program instructions for the computer to have this short explanatory note printed out whenever the program was run:
  • In the Beginning, Nothing is divided by its own Unity; at each succeeding stage of further division, the new dividend is the old divider, the new divider is the sum of the old dividend and the old divider.
  • The program yields quotients ever increasing from 0 by successively smaller increments in the left-hand column, alternating with quotients ever decreasing from 1 by successively smaller diminutions in the right-hand column, and converging towards 0.6180339887498949.
  • All the numbers generated in this Fibonacci series may express a vital relationship of cosmic significance.
  • Different trees, for instance, exhibit characteristic angles of divergence for adjacent leaves. This angle, expressed as a fraction of 360o is 1/2 for the elm and the linden, 1/3 for the beech, 2/5 for the cherry and the oak, 3/8 for the pear and the poplar, and 5/13 for the willow...."

If you ever decide to explore the connection between what I have written immediately above, and some of Underwood's research into the fashioning and positioning of the individual stones at Stonehenge, you may surmise that the 'monument' was, under Annunaki guidance, so constructed as to enable the growth of specific crops in that locality, as well as having the other advantages in its favour which you and other researchers have already rediscovered.

On page 27 you begin to discuss the Aztec Calendar, referring specifically to a golden disk melted down by the Spaniards, while mentioning stone replicas. My bedroom houses a smaller metal copy, and my lounge a more detailed plastercast copy of the 11' 9.75" in diameter olivine basalt replica made in 1479 A.D. and kept in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. I obtained the latter from Horacio Labat, an archaeologist who worked at Machu Picchu and showed me photographs of the main locations in each of the four seasons of the year. He made the mould from which this copy is cast. Until the Falklands war compelled him, as an Argentinian consulate official, to leave London, he also directed the New Acropolis educational charity. Friendship with him stimulated the continuing growth of my interest in Ancient Egypt at that time. So far as I know, his current address is: c/o Nueva Acropolis, Gran Via 22, Dpdo 2o MADRID 28013, Spain. If you are not already in contact with this group - an international break-away from the Theosophical Society which the founders of N.A. believed was excessively biased towards India and near-Indian themes, you may wish to find out where they are in U.S.A. Although I gave a few lectures at their London centre when Horacio Labat headed it, I was never myself a member of N.A. Among my motives for including this detail is the fact that Horacio owned an, I think, 3-volume study in Spanish exclusively devoted to the Aztec Calendar, and I am not sure you know this work.

Although you mention J. Argüelles' The Mayan Factor on page 306, you don't refer to his earlier and, in its revised form, later study Earth Ascending. I am not suggesting that you should have done so, but since there are in your book occasional remarks about 'the merely symbolic' in contrast with 'the truly scientific' (even if not in those precise terms), I suggest you take into closer consideration this author's belief that the Aztec Calendar is much more of a holonomic register than a mere chronometer, that (T.M.F., page 52) "measure refers to the principle of rhythm, periodicity, and form accounting for the different limiting qualities (my italics) which energy assumes through its different transformations," that (p.54) "the essence of information, then, is not its content but its resonance," and that (p.55) "harmony is a science". To quote again from my The Rainbow Cymbal (p.186):

  • "Hearing and seeing (which is somewhat akin to hearing-at-the-speed-of-light or, more properly, at the frequency of illumination and above) are, by the way, particularly apt verbs with which to signify our innate capacity to interpret natural symbols.
  • Symbols properly understood are, as Terence O'Brien [a Jungian analyst and Catholic priest of my acquaintance] has stressed, 'the medium through which personal growth takes place,' because they facilitate an interior integration of the most ancient with the most recently developed functional areas of the brain and, as Jose Argüelles has very clearly appreciated, because each 'symbol is a resonant structure, the reverberation of a particular quality of radiant energy that takes form in our senses.'
  • A symbol in this ancient and traditonal sense is never, in other words, a matter of arbitrary convention, but is both the fruit of and the key to a vital contemplation of the essential and dynamic unity that exists between Nature and Spirit.
  • It is a 'form-constant that exists in and defines a field of consciousness that transcends both time and the individual. The world is a weave of symbols, and it is through symbols that we weave our understanding of the world....
  • When we understand that symbols are actually resonant structures, vibratory form-fields, and that we ourselves are resonant to our very core, then we can see that symbols are not something æry-færy but are completely vital to our functioning as whole beings. Asleep and unconscious to the potency of symbols, our dreams become nightmares, and we live hostages to a world which is in reality the eclipse of symbolic knowing....
  • It is not poetry alone that commands us to declare that just as a flower cannot live without light and water, we cannot live without symbols.' "

That is why in The Way of Woman IN Today's World I sought to bring together your own findings with those of Helen M. Luke; it is also my principal motive for taking an interest in the work of writers like Bruce Cathie.

On page 28 you write: "The idea that calendars could be made of stone might seem strange to us, but was evidently quite logical in antiquity." Underwood, as well as explaining that Stonehenge is much more than 'a calendar' mentions that certain forms of life do not develop in proximity to metal, the use of which was, therefore, inappropriate.

On, e.g., page 33 you note that "the bluestones originated from the Prescelly Mountains in southwestern Wales." You will be interested to know that in the Autumn (Sept. - Nov.) 1993 Quarterly issue of Kindred Spirit, which includes Part I of his article: "Sun-Moon Integration", Robin Heath writes (p.20):

"It is an incontrovertible fact that the bluestones come from a latitude which is one-seventh of 364º (52º) whilst the Sarsen stones come from a latitude which is one-seventh of 360 (51.43º).... Thus it is that the two major sources of stone from which Stonehenge was constructed reflect perfectly the two clear choices for a sensible calendar system..."

In the light of Underwood and others, and in view of your interest in the snake aspect, you could have brought in at page 35 or thereabouts quite a bit more about the serpentine geodetic currents still alive at and near Stonehenge and Avebury, etc.

Although, however, on page 37 you envisage the possibility of travellers by sea to Cornwall then proceeding overland to Stonehenge, Joan D'Arcy Cooper, greatly interested in the Sumerian influence on life in this part of the world as she was, suggests that persons arriving from overseas via Cornwall did not normally go further East than what came to be called Glastonbury, although as time went by some people did come westwards overland to Glastonbury and the region further West. I don't think the explanation for this is germane to your own research, but such conclusions, however tentatively stated, do, I instinctively feel, merit our respect.

In the following pages you discuss various aspects of Stonehenge in much more detail. In view of your own general theme, it is a pity you have not found space at least to mention the relationship of geometrical proportions based on the 3-4-5 right-angled triangle between the dimensions of the Moon and the Earth, and how these are, with the dimensions of the Sun, reflected at Stonehenge. Bonnie Gaunt is quite clear in her treatment of this. She also mentions that if the diagonal linking station-stones 93 and 91 be extended it points directly towards the Great Pyramid. Since you mention that the Sphinx also served as a telecommunications device of some kind along the 30º N. parallel, it seems worthwhile investigating the possibility of some sort of similar link-up existing between Stonehenge and Giza.

Incidentally, considering that while the upright stones stood on uneven ground and were of varying height, the upper surfaces of the lintels have, it is claimed, been arranged to provide an optically smooth horizontal surface, have you ever thought that Stonehenge may have also served as a launching-pad for intercontinental flights, with the Sinai or Lebanon underground silo replaced by something above ground in the more or less circular gap below the level of the lintels' upper surface, from which such a craft may have been on occasions launched?

As Bonnie Gaunt quotes Jeremy Collier as saying (The Magnificent Numbers..., p.28): "We must not let go manifest truths because we cannot answer all questions about them." A quote you may one day find it useful to remind her of, if her Fundamentalism proves still to be a bit of a hurdle!

Illustrations 43a & b on page 90 suggest what the Ark of the Covenant may have looked like. If you can get your hands on a copy, D. Wood's Genisis - The First Book of Revelations (Baton Press, Southborough, 1985) includes what may prove to be a much more precise illustration. He is a professionally trained cartographer, and this lavishly illustrated book, which links Rennes-le-Château in the French Pyrenees with Ancient Egypt and Atlantis, is topographically fascinating.

A few pages later you move on to discuss the Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. Bonnie Gaunt interestingly draws attention to the pentagonal shape of its door.

On page 256 you write: "In October 1991, some fifteen years after our intiial presentation of such evidence in The 12th Planet, Dr. Robert M. Schoch... reported that... the Sphinx... was carved... 'long before the dynasties of the Pharaohs.' The research methods included seismic surveying... by Dr. Thomas L. Dobecki... and Anthony West...."

I remember reading something similar at about the same time in a British daily: The Independent (issue of Monday 14 October 1991, which I have in front of me now).... and then taking from my shelves my copy of John Anthony West's Serpent In The Sky - The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt (copyright 1978, my copy in an edition first published in Great Britain by Wildwood House in 1979) pages 196-226 of which are wholly given over to a detailed discussion of erosion and the age of the Sphinx, etc., largely as evidence in support of R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz's claim in his 3-volume study Le Temple de l'homme - Apet du sud à Louqsor (Caractères, Paris, 1958) and other works that the Great Pyramid clearly ante-dated Ancient Egypt. So, most emphatically, you are not alone, nor have you been! (Save, of course, in the most important sense mentioned by Helen M. Luke, to which I refer with gratitude in The Way of Woman....)

A most valuable corrective to the notion that Shakespeare or Gœthe and the like are originating pioneers, rather than standard-bearers for a hidden groundswell is Denis Saurat's Gods of the People (John Westhouse, London, 1947). Saurat was admired by General De Gaulle, and I learned a lot from his book.

On page 281 you state: "The myths and legends of early times, recorded in such works as Homer's Iliad, deal in fact with locations that were in Anatolia." You know, however, that, notwithstanding Heinrich Schliemann's claims, I am inclined to agree with Iman Wilkens' claim that the Trojan War was fought near where is now Cambridge, England. In other words, I believe there are important gaps in your picture of events as regards the period, say, 1300-500 B.C. in particular.

In Mirror of Justice I also summarised Wilkens' view that the Odyssey is largely a coded but detailed mariner's guide to transatlantic navigation, a claim which, by and large, supports the main thrust of your own argument.

I don't know whether or not you are familiar with William H. Stiebing, Jr.'s Ancient Astronauts, Cosmic Collisons and Other Popular Theories About Man's Past (Prometheus Books, Buffalo, 1984). Although your discussion (page 286 onwards) of the Piri Re'is Map does not follow Van Däniken in claiming that Hapgood's study shows it "must derive from ærial photography", when "Hapgood never made such a claim," (Stiebing, o.c., p. 92), you don't actually point out to your readers that (ibid., pp. 92-3):

  • "The Caribbean area on the Piri Re'is map bears little resemblance to reality. Cuba is wrongly labelled 'Hispaniola' and is drawn totally out of proportion. The Virgin Islands are shown in the wrong positions, incorrectly shaped and badly out of scale. The eastern coast of South America is also represented incorrectly: The Amazon River appears twice, nine hundred miles of coastline are missing, and there is no sea passage shown between South America and Antarctica.... Finally, despite claims to the contrary, the coast of Antarctica on the map is not in very close agreement with either the present-day coastline or seismic profiles of the area...."

The blurb on the back of Stiebing's work claims he "critically evaluates some popular hypotheses about man's early history that have been promoted through best-selling books, movies, and television programs." My own impression is that he occasionally is over-ready to debunk any view that clashes with his own ideas about the nature and status of contemporary 'knowledge'. Nevertheless, you may like to have his book to hand, since "he has participated in archæological excavations at sites in Jordan and Lebanon...."

These few brief observations may not amount to very much, especially in today's world in which the frontiers both of our knowledge and our ignorance are expanding ever more rapidly in every dimension I can think of, but I sincerely hope they may suffice to demonstrate the truth of my claim to be deeply interested in your personal endeavours and achievements to date, and that for honourable and worthy motives directly expressing a shared commitment to the service of the human family my parents taught me to honour and respect.

I remain uncertain as to why in your books you use "we" in preference to "I", and if this indicates you have been blessed with clearly perceptible guidance in your dreams, I would pray that such assistance may continue and, indeed, increase....

 

 

 

To The Editor (Letters for Publication)

Radio Times

80 Wood Lane, London W12 0TT

7 February 1994

Dear Sir,

Presenting "The Great Pyramid - Gateway to the Stars" on BBC 2 (Sunday, 6 February, 9.30 pm), Emma Freud stated that this edifice was about 4,500 years old, and in the Radio Times (Vol. 280, No. 3656, 5-11 February, p.24) Gareth Huw Davies asserted that "King Khufu (Cheops to the Greeks) constructed the Great Pyramid around 2450 BC."

King Khufu denies this. The opening verses on a limestone stela discovered near the Great Pyramid in the ruins of a temple of Isis in the 1850s by Auguste Mariette include the proclamation that Khufu "founded the House of Isis, Mistress of the Pyramid, beside the House of the Sphinx."

Zecharia Sitchin included a photograph of this stela (which is now in the Cairo Museum) in The Stairway to Heaven - The Second Book of The Earth Chronicles (St. Martin's Press, 1980; Avon Books, 1983; Bear & Co., 1992), where, as well as noting that "the Great Pyramid was already standing when Khufu arrived on the scene" (p.256), he convincingly argued (pp. 259-82) that Khufu's cartouche inside the Pyramid itself is a clumsy forgery made by Colonel Richard Howard Vyse in 1837, and written in a script that did not come into use until several centuries later than the Fourth Dynasty.

The discovery of an unopened door in the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber deserves to be related to its proper context - it was in about 8,670 BC that, as Sitchin relates, rulership over Egypt was transferred from the supporters of Ra/Marduk to those of Thoth, the Great Pyramid emptied of most of its technical equipment, and Heliopolis built to replace it as Beacon City...

Note: A copy of the above letter was also made available to Robert Bauval & Adrian Gilbert, authors of The Orion Mystery (Heinemann, 1994).

To: Filip Coppens, Dendermondse Steenweg 56
9100 SINT-NIKLAAS, Belgium

16 June 2001

 

Dear Filip,

I am currently a member of R.I.L.K.O. and the back cover of no. 58 of the R.I.L.K.O. Journal tells me that you haven't changed your address since 1993, when you completed Atlantis, your fascinating account of Marcel "Mestdagh's Theory on a Lost Civilization", of which I knew nothing at all until very recently.

My friend Joseph S. Ellul, who was born 6 years before Marcel and whose life experience to date has, of course, been vastly different than his, nevertheless shared his keen interest in Atlantis and antediluvian civilization. Although the original 1988 English-language edition of his Malta's Prediluvian Culture at the Stone-Age Temples with special reference to Ħaġar Qim, Għar Dalam, Cart-ruts, Il-Misqa, Il-Maqluba and Creation is now out of print, a revised and enhanced edition will shortly be made available; meanwhile, he can still supply copies of its 1994 updated German translation Die Steinzeittempel Maltas und ihre Vorsintflutliche Kultur mit besonderem Bezug zu Ħaġar Qim, Għar Dalam, Cart-ruts, Il-Maqluba & Schoepfung. The complete text of both editions may also freely be read on or downloaded from the Internet, as indicated above.

I first came across Joseph's book during my first visit to Malta in 1994, began an intermittent correspondence with him the following year, then met him personally in 1999, and we are now very good friends with several interests in common.

You mention Maurice Châtelain in connection with what you have called the Apollo line and you also refer to the intriguing Maltese Cross featured in his Cosmic Ancestors; it's a great book, and I'm glad I have a copy.

Even more fascinating are Bodvar Schjelderup's The Language of Recognition - Book One: Evidence (Forlaget Freidag, Skansegata 26a, Trondheim N-7014, Norway: 1986) and Loggbok for en helgen - A Saint's Logbook (Oslo: Genesis Forlag 1997), both of which contain a considerable number of valuable maps and plans nowhere else available, the result of many years research and contemplation by this highly gifted Associate Professor of Architecture, whose first book I was fortunate enough to come across in London in 1986. Both works are, perhaps, still available from his home address but otherwise, I suspect, very hard to come by. I'm quite sure you'd love to have them.

However, my chief reason for contacting you just now is Kurt Schildmann's breathtakingly instructive Als das Raumschiff 'Athena' die Erde kippte - Indus-, Borrows-Cave- und Glozel-Texte entziffert (ISBN 3-933817-15-3).

As you may already know, this author, who was 90 years old in March 1999 and is President of the Society of German Linguists, became in 1994 the first to decipher the Indus Valley texts, which are, as he now interpets them, mainly written in phonetic archaic or proto-Sanskrit, a feature he has since 1997 been consistently claiming they have in common with the perhaps even more fascinating Burrow Caves texts, as well as with the texts from Cuenca (Peru) in the Crespi Collection.

I first wrote to Kurt last year in connection with his at that time still unpublished decipherment of the Tal Qadi incised stone kept in Malta's National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta, which appears to have been written in the same script. This also seems to hold true in regard to some other ancient texts found at Alvao (Portugal), Fuenteventura (Canary Islands) and Glozel (France).

Although Kurt's work certainly contributes greatly to validating the claims to authenticity of both the Burrows Caves and Glozel texts, they are clearly controversial. Few maps of France show Glozel, so I have borrowed one of yours and modified it very slightly to show Glozel's approximate location relatively to Vichy and, even more importantly, to Sens, very probably the site of the former capitol of Atlantis, where, as you intriguingly mention, some similar texts have also already come to light.

Learning To Read Dr. Crawford Knox's

Changing Christian Paradigms

And Their Implications For Modern Thought

 

Changing Christian Paradigms (ISSN 01698-8834; ISBN 90 04 09670 1) was published by E. J. Brill (Leiden - New York - Koeln) in 1993, and is Volume LVII in the Numen BookSeries: Studies In The History Of Religions, edited by H. G. Kippenberg & E.T. Lawson.

I became aware of the existence of this book as a result of reading a short review of it by the Rev. John Kerr in the Scientific & Medical Network Newsletter (No. 52, August 1993, pp. 52-53) and I, too, am convinced that many of the author's conclusions are over-generalised, and that his very extensive use of sources which are not only secondary but, by and large, extremely recent, seriously detracts from the work's evidential credibility - save as a more or less reliable guide to the thought of the relatively small number of authors from among the 144 included in his bibliography, whose writings Knox actually quotes and discusses philosophically.

The circumstance, he writes (p.31), "that most people respond with warmth if they meet in another person's attitude, openness, sincerity, integrity, confidence and trust, will hardly be controversial. That many animals tend similarly to respond to people who are open towards them may also seem fairly obvious to many people. Some will even accept that some people seem to establish some kind of rapport with their plants - that they have 'green fingers'. But that the environment as a whole, down to the very stones, has some sort of personal attitude to man as it unfolds, takes us right outside Western understanding and credence - though there are, perhaps, even in our Western society, many more people than is generally recognised, who have a strong sense, not only of being personally guided and that G-d will bring about what is needed at the appropriate time, but of his presence. This is precisely what the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament testify to."

"The world" of today, he claims (p.22), "is largely a physical state, an entity; for the Israelites it was primarily an ordering process in which G-d was personally present.... As Westerman says (in What does the Old Testament say about G-d?, London, 1979, p.42): 'In the Old Testament the entirety of the universe is something which happens and only in a secondary sense something which exists.' And he comments that the Old Testament does not emphasise the state caused by the saving, i.e. the 'salvation' (das Heil), but rather the process of saving. The Old Testament narrates, not a history of salvation, but a history of the saving acts of G-d."

For Crawford Knox, G-d is enclosing, not enclosed. As we read in the book of Revelation, 21:6, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end," and, of course, the middle, too. The Early Christians lived this shared experience of communion or koinonia. A metaphysician might sum up this process by affirming simply that Being IS. One modern shaman, Professor Brian Bates, refers to something he calls the web of wyrd. Plato wrote about mimesis and methexis. St. Paul's word (Romans 8:28) is synergy: "We know that to those who love G-d everything works together (sunergei) for good." In the writings of Orthodox theologians this same process is called the Economy. Others speak of participation mystique but, whatever the label, wholeness and maturity of perception are qualities which, as Knox has grown increasingly to appreciate, are very much needed in order to appreciate this perfect and wise ordering of events, "which cannot be comprehended in individual acts and which is called blessing. The whole realm of nature belongs to the working of G-d as much as does his specific working in history. The blessing of the creator is effective in the movement of the generations of the human race through space and time: it is effective in the ever-constant rhythm of conception, birth and death."

This is the book's main thesis, a thesis the truth and importance of which is to me obvious, experiential and traditional, and so I was more than puzzled by Knox's claim that it is a truth which Western Christian theologians have, since the time and largely as a result of the influence within theology of the teachings of St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), increasingly lost sight of, but to an improved and more contemporary appreciation of which recent developments in the empirical sciences, both exoteric and esoteric, can (and this is his book's main argument) and, indeed, ought now (within the context of an ongoing open debate of the sort his book seeks to stimulate) to help us all, individually and collectively, freely to achieve.

Thus, "wisdom is 'knowing the way' in which one... must walk (Prov. 14:8).... And this has always to be thought of in dynamic terms - in terms of response to changing situations. When truth is offered to a man through an emerging situation, therefore, there is no longer free decision: a refusal to accept it puts man under moral judgement and indeed involves musjudging G-d himself. G. von Rad notes (in Wisdom in Israel, London, 1972, p.66) that 'fear of Yahweh' has a wide range of meaning but seems to have been understood by the Wisdom teachers as simply obedience to the divine will: the modern reader has, therefore, to eliminate the idea of something emotional: and von Rad refers to ideas of 'commitment to', 'knowledge about' Yahweh, even tending to 'confidence in' Yahweh as possible meanings.

In keeping with this all-embracing understanding of the divine which was achieved through this empirical attitude towards emerging reality, was the view that the good was not just something internal but public: being good and prospering were closely related, for such 'goodness' was a sign of righteousness and righteousness involved being 'right' not just with G-d but with the community and indeed the natural world.... In no way, therefore, did Yahweh exercise some sort of judicial function, exercised after the event of reward and retribution in accordance with pre-established moral norms. It is rather that, throughout the Old Testament, actions have built-in consequences which flow directly from them.... The natural world is not apart from Yahweh for he is present in it and acting through it and the correspondence between actions and consequences is a result of his faithfulness."(pp.26-7.)

"The order of Yahweh... is good and life-promoting. What is more, because that good and life-promoting order could be discerned by the man who stood right with G-d by having attained wholeness and maturity, so could he perceive deviations from it: deviations that led to evil and suffering.... What ought to be done by man to order his life and to bring blessing and fruitfulness of G-d upon him and his fellows, was to be discerned, not so much by the application of abstract ethical principles, but from man's harmonious interactions within the unfolding natural order which was itself the order of G-d: harmonious interactions summed up in the great Jewish word shalom." (p.28.)

"Both in the Old and New Testaments, humility and openness to G-d and faith in Christ... are promised to lead to prosperity in this life, as well as life in G-d.... The great Jewish word 'shalom' is usually translated 'peace' but... speaks of balanced, integrated and harmonious relationships of man with G-d, with his fellow men and with the rest of the natural world: relationships held together by the idea of creation as the gift of G-d in which he is himself present, revealing himself particularly in the creativity of wonder, beauty, goodness, love and joy: gifts which are for man actively to enjoy but which demand from him a totally objective and humble realism illuminated by goodness, all of which he holds in trust from G-d." (p.333.)

"Fear of G-d (in the sense referred to above) 'not only enabled a man to acquire knowledge, but also had a predominantly critical function in that it kept awake in the person acquiring the knowledge the awareness that his intellect was directed towards a world in which mystery predominated.' This fear of G-d trained him to openness, the readiness for an encounter even with the inscrutable and the imponderable. It taught him, therefore, that the sphere in which definite, verifiable orders can be discerned is a very limited one. The mysteries of the unfolding world have... no independent existence. In them man directly confronts the mystery of G-d. 'This is, indeed, the fascinating thing about this investigation of life, the fact that men dared to address themselves to a world in which they had to reckon at every step with the possibility of encountering the totally incommensurable G-d. Fascinating, too, is the calm, unperturbed way in which this investigation is pursued on such a terrain and faced with such a partner.' (G. Van Rad, o.c., p.109)....

In Proverbs 8... 'this world order turns, as a person, towards men, wooing them and encouraging them in direct address. What is objectified here, then, is not an attribute of G-d but an attribute of the world, namely that mysterious attribute, by virtue of which she turns towards men to give order to their lives.... This world reason was there before all the works of creation, playing in the world like a child; like a "favourite", she was the delight of G-d and, even from the very beginning, she was turned towards men in cheerful playful disposition.' (Ibid., p.156)....

'The facts are clear. Wisdom... calls to men.... In this call we are dealing with the very opposite of something private and personal or even esoteric, which would be accessible only to initiates. She stands, not in a hidden place but "on the heights", "by the roadside", where "the paths cross" (Prov., 8:2). She speaks not from the sacral sphere of the sanctuary, but in the most profane public place. And what she says is clear and precise, that men should learn from her and listen to her.' " (Ibid., p. 158, quoted in Knox, o.c., pp. 28-9.)

John Kerr, in the review of Changing Christian Paradigms to which I initially referred, drew attention to the considerable length of Crawford Knox's quotations from G. van Rad's writings "despite continuing scholarly controversy and research", and despite Knox's own admission (p.110) that what he is offering us are "cursory and necessarily inadequate historical chapters... to illustrate how the understanding of G-d and of his relationship to the world has changed over the almost 2000 years since the birth of Christ."

As complementary evidence to illustrate how throughout that period the Christian Church has never lost her primordial sense of Christ's Paschal Mystery, suffice it to quote by way of example the second reading from the Roman Catholic Church's Office of Readings for Thursday of Week 2 in Lent, which you will find in volume 2 of The Divine Office (Collins/E.J.Dwyer/Talbot, London - Glasgow - Sydney - Dublin, 1974, pp. 135-6), and which is taken from the commentary of St. Hilary of Poitiers (who died in 367, 20 years before St. Augustine was baptised by St. Ambrose) on Psalms 127:1-3:

  • " 'Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways.' Whenever scripture speaks of the fear of the Lord, we notice that it is never mentioned on its own, as if fear could by itself bring our faith to perfection. Instead, much else is said either before or afterwards to help us to understand the principle of fearing the Lord, and how this fear can be made perfect. This we know from what Solomon says in the book of Proverbs, 'If you would cry out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord.'
  • We see how many steps we must climb to come to fear the Lord. First, we must call wisdom to our side. We must hand over to our intellect the whole task of making choices. We must seek wisdom out and track her down. Then we shall understand what it is to fear the Lord. Certainly this is not how the ordinary run of men think about fear. Fear is the trembling of human weakness frightened of suffering what we do not want to happen to us. This fear is caused in us and stirred by our consciousness of our guilt, or by the power of one stronger than ourselves, or the aggression of one too powerful for us; or it may be caused by sickness, or the attack of a wild animal, or the infliction of any evil.
  • This fear then is not taught but it comes from our human weakness. We do not learn what we ought to fear. Rather, the things we fear themselves instil their own dread in our minds.
  • But of the true fear of G-d we read, 'Come, O sons, listen to me, I will teach you the fear of the Lord.' The fear of G-d, then, is something to be learnt, because it is taught. Its origins are found by way of teaching, and not in fright. We must find it by obeying commands, by doing the good deeds of a blameless life, and by coming to know the truth, and not in moments of human terror.
  • All our fear of G-d is inspired by love; perfect love of G-d makes fear perfect. We show our love of G-d especially when we follow his advice, conform to his laws, and trust in his promises. We must follow the words of scripture: 'And now, Israel, what does the Lord your G-d require of you, but to fear the Lord your G-d, to walk in all his ways, to love him and to keep his commandments with all your heart and with all your soul, that it may be well with you.'
  • Many indeed are the ways of the Lord, for he himself is the way. When he spoke of himself, he called himself the way, and he told us why he had done so in these words, 'No one comes to the Father except by me.'
  • We must, then, examine many ways, and start out on many of them, so that we may find the one way which is good, the way of eternal life, following the instructions of many different teachers. There are ways provided by the law, or the prophets, or the gospels, or the apostles. We find ways, too, in the various works of the commandments. Those who walk in such ways in the fear of G-d are blessed."

 

What follows is a slightly edited extract from a Letter which, after reading Changing Christian Paradigms and writing the preceding paragraphs, I wrote on 9 March 1994 from my own home address in Exeter to:

Dr. Crawford Knox

Burrow Wood, East Hill, OTTERY ST. MARY, Devon EX11 1QF:

  • "Dear Dr. Knox,
  • Although you live locally, I am not too surprised that the copy of your Changing Christian Paradigms on loan to me is an Inter-Library Loan to Devon Library Services from the British Library stock at Wetherby in West Yorkshire!
  • As a piece of written English, it is good, even elegant. It also witnesses powerfully to the breadth and scope of your personal achievement in struggling honestly and openly to reconcile into some form of patterned unity myriads of disparate data. I found Chapters II & XXVIII especially congenial to my present habits of prayer and meditation....
  • Étienne Gilson, a distinguished historian to whom you more than once refer, had, it is true, many honorary doctorates conferred upon him. However, his thesis that there ever existed something describable as 'medieval philosophy' has not, I think, been proved. Aquinas, whom Gilson gravely misunderstood at fundamental points (cf. Bernard Lonergan's 1963 article "Metaphysics as Horizon" in Gregorianum 44, pp. 307-18; reprinted in The Current 5, 1964, pp. 6-23, and included as Chapter 13 in Collection - Papers by Bernard Lonergan, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1967), clearly regarded himself as a theologian - and that not merely in today's anodyne academic sense, but in the sense of one whose priestly, prophetic and regal vocation and mission in life it is to BE G-d's spokesman in relation to G-d's Word present on "the Sacred Page".
  • The history of ascetical and mystical theology and, in particular, the lives of the saints abundantly proclaim that at no period in history has the Christian Church ever entirely forgotten that, to quote our Master's words, while He IS The Vine; we are branches. I suspect that in order to validate your own picture by contrasting it with St. Augustine's, you have introduced a bi-polarity and clarity of positions that ill matches the varieties of experience, the infinity of G-d, and the uncertainties of human development.
  • Price's 'explanation' of telepathy, etc., in terms of 'explaining' our ordinary lack of skill in that direction as a learned inhibition resulting from a Bergsonian attention to the pressing requirements of 'life' is plausible. Bohm's notion of an implicate order is an important one. However, I believe J.D. Solomon's The Mind's Ear (re. which David Lorimer keeps master-copies of 2 papers I wrote, cf. Scientific & Medical Network Newsletter Nos. 45 & 46, April & August 1991) is clearer re. time as timing in a one-dimensional pluriverse of discrete changings, where resonance in memory is central.
  • The writings of one of my favourite Doctors of the Church, St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), while in many ways different from Solomon's, nevertheless, I very much feel, equally clearly presuppose the sort of panentheistic cosmology your own book supposes had by then been largely lost sight of....
  • Summing up what is purely my personal response: Your book is well written, contains much useful data, is valuable as a witness to the integrity of your own quest, but ought not to be considered an authority on Church History, the Development of Dogma, the History of Doctrinal Development, Pastoral Practice in the Church, G-d's Grace in History, the Lives of the Saints, or the History of Mysticism. Each of those areas of study is well developed, has its proper methodology, and well repays study.
  • However, nowadays I recommend friends unacquainted with either Bernard Lonergan's Insight - A Study of Human Understanding (5th edition as Vol. 3 of Collected Works of B. Lonergan, University of Toronto Press, 1992), or Helen M. Luke's Kaleidoscope - The Way of Woman and other essays (Parabola Books, New York, 1992) to master these first, as a propaedeutic to beginning to think afresh.
  • For that, I hope, you will agree with me is nowadays something all of us increasingly experience a need again to learn to do!..."

 

When I wrote that letter I wasn't only delighted that Dr. Knox had grown to make his own a way of appreciating G-d's presence which nowadays I sometimes almost take for granted; I was also irritated by his, in my eyes, so obvious lack of adequate preparation for the demanding task he had nevertheless, I imagined, embarked upon - that of writing and publishing what purported to be a scholarly contribution either to the history of Christian theology in the Western Church, or at least to that of the decline in quality, if he was right (which he also so obviously wasn't) of most if not all speculative theological work carried out throughout the centuries within that tradition.

However, his courteous reply of 10 March 1994 helped me to re-assess the situation. He wrote:

  • "Your letter of 9 March has just reached me. I have read it and the enclosure with great interest and will certainly re-read it several times.
  • I am only too well aware that human nature (manifesting in very limited measure, the plenitude of the divine) expresses itself in so many forms that every generalisation is an over-simplification and admits of countless exceptions. Nonetheless, on that ground to refrain from generalisation - that way lies paralysis.
  • I do appreciate the many strands and the great richness of Roman Catholic thought yet that does not, of itself, invalidate what I say. You criticise Gilson; yet his work is still regarded by many as authoritative and, of course, carried the imprimatur*. The most I could claim is that he, along with the many others that I quote, do, I hope, deserve to be taken seriously.

*[ Perhaps it is worth noting that (1) some books which have been granted an imprimatur are, nevertheless, printed without that fact's being advertised in their introductory pages, (2) the granting of an imprimatur does not imply official Roman Catholic endorsement of a book's contents, but simply acknowledges that they are not importantly incompatible with fundamental tenets of the Faith. Thus, Lonergan's criticisms of Gilson also "carried the imprimatur"!]

  • I can assure you that it would not have occurred to me to think of my work as an authority in the fields you mention. As I said at the end of my first chapter: 'The Problem that we Face': 'Because these issues carry such far-reaching implications, the scope of this study is therefore very wide and far-ranging. It attempts to open or re-open a debate rather than determine it. Whether it will succeed in doing so depends upon its readers.'
  • I would only add that I do believe that the fundamental change in the understanding of the Trinity that followed Augustine did, I believe, enshrine a much wider change in the understanding of the Christian Church about the relationship of G-d to the world and the role of the Church in it.
  • hope that despite your reservations, you found the book rewarding...."

 

I replied on 11 March:

  • ".... Thank you for yours of yesterday's date.... While confident that I have discerned and hopeful that I may have commented helpfully on the main lines of argument in your book, I have not yet digested it in detail. However, when I have done so, I shall, unless otherwise invited, forbear further detailed comment, since I am by now fully persuaded that all learning occurs in the course of a self-correcting process, where even a slight nudge from the outside can so easily be the reverse of helpful.
  • I don't doubt the sincerity of your not thinking of your own work as authoritative within the research areas I mentioned the other day. Nevertheless, since in 1988, shortly after my first moving to Devon, you admitted to being "fairly deeply steeped in traditional R.C. theology from Augustine on", as well as to knowing personally Fr. Victor White OP, whom my spiritual director, Fr. Terence O'Brien SDB (who also knew him personally), taught me to appreciate and respect forty years ago now, I had meantime been nurturing very high anticipations of your book to come.
  • You wrote to me then that your "particular concerns" were "in rediscovering the understandings of the O.T. (especially the Wisdom literature), the N.T. & the early Church (especially the Greek Fathers), which were radically altered and re-orientated by Augustine and hence were the main formative influence in the Western Church & Western civilisation. Suffice it to say that the mutual indwelling was replaced by a separation of G-d and the world which has widened century by century so that our current materialist view is what is left when G-d has been evacuated from the world. On this basis, the current split between religion & science can be seen as a 'conceptual artefact'."
  • I have quoted that passage from your undated first letter to me, firstly, because it so excellently summarises your book's main thesis, but secondly, because it in fact also encouraged me to surmise that you had a much greater familiarity with Greek, Hebrew and other Scripture-related ancient languages than I have, and that, in consequence, your research, when sufficiently advanced for its results to be published, would shed a brighter and closer light on important textual and socio-cultural-contextual problems re. the interpretation of O.T. & N.T. texts by different individual Early Church Greek Fathers.
  • More specifically, I imagined your work might, in due course, enrich my own understanding of the past, just as did, for instance, my reading in the early 60's of a research-paper by a Portuguese colleague of mine - a study of the meaning of the word 'confession' in the Confessions of St. Augustine.
  • Although Augustine of Hippo's writings are invariably, as this monograph shows in some detail and with a variety of significant examples, integral expressions of - and so contributions to - the further growth of his own individual interior life of contemplative 'Thanks-&-Praise' (the primary meaning of 'confession' in both Sacred Scripture & Augustine) to G-d as more closely present to us than we are to ourselves, you, more to my amazed surprise than intellectual disappointment, manage to find in this Saint's writings (and that without feeling any need actually to quote him!*) evidence of G-d's banishment from the cosmic Body of Christ to some merely Mystical Body of Christ which is ad extra.

* [Save for brief references (pp. 55 & 75) to Conf 7.5 and to The Teacher Ch 11/38.]

  • That amazed surprise was, of course, tempered by the circumstance that I no longer expect any one human person to be other than uniquely individual, and so I have simply noted as a problem, rather than expostulated against as a fundamental error your own book's tendency to gloss over the, for me, important distinction between a 'distinction' and a 'separation'. Thus, for me, 'Immanence' is a sub-species of 'Transcendence'*, not its contrary, since Being (1) IS, and, therefore, (2) cannot, as such, ex-sist.

* [Knox actually notices this himself (p.166).]

  • I trust that your own steeping in Catholic theology is sufficiently remembered for your being able to join with me in agreeing that: (1) if, as Parmenides is said to have taught us, Being IS and outside Being there is nothing, CREATING as a Free Celebration IN-&-of Divine Love (creatio active sumpta, sc. ex parte Ipsius Dei Creantis considerata) eternally IS G-D Transcendent; (2) if and to the extent that contingent minerals, plants, animals, humans and angels ex-sist within G-d's Creation (creatio passive sumpta, i.e., ea quae creata sunt) they not only are not, but must, therefore, in some sense, be other than G-d - which is, of course, a Great Mystery (and, indeed, so destined to remain: cf. I Corinthians 13:13) precisely because it implies that the creature-Creator distinction need not be a separation at all.
  • Just as I regard the distinction between 'Tradition' and 'tradition' as the most important feature of the French (which was the first to be published) text of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church (Paris, 1992; London, due in 1994!), so I believe Aquinas's most significant contribution to speculative theology was his affirmation that 'agere est pati quoddam'.
  • More obviously relevant to your own work re. Augustine is, however, what I, following Lonergan, wrote in Voice In The Darkness (1978, p.115): "It took Saint Augustine years to discover that the word 'real' did not have the same connotation as the word 'body'. Man, as I have already emphasised, stands in need of an intellectual conversion from the shadows and images of his private dream-world to the truth of the universe of being. Very few realise it is through concepts and judgments that authentic, real being is known. Nevertheless, all science presupposes that reality is intelligible, and metaphysics is the discovery that reality is intelligibility."

 

Lonergan, although I met him only twice, has been a major influence in my development. I honour the Pelagians where he seems to endorse Augustine's evalation of them, but otherwise broadly agree with what Lonergan himself wrote on pages 2-5 of his Grace and Freedom - Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1971 - from which this section of my Letter to Dr. Crawford Knox is quoting both text and notes):

"ST. AUGUSTINE'S

De Gratia et libero arbitrio.

The division of grace into operative and cooperative arose not from a detached love of systematization but to meet the exigencies of a controversy. Like more recent strategists, the Pelagians did not defend a rigidly coherent one but rather an elastic set of positions arranged in depth. They agreed with the Stoics that man asked the gods not for virtue but only for fortune: that was their citadel; their battle-front was anywhere. If grace existed, then it was not necessary. If necessary, then it was the law, or knowledge of the law, or nature, or free will, or the remission of sins. If none of these would do, then it was given man according to his merits. If forced to admit that the merit of good deeds presupposes the gift of grace, there were those who would reply that the grace that causes good deeds is meted out according to the previous merit of good will.*

  • * "Etsi non datur [gratia] secundum merita bonorum operum, quia per ipsam bene operamur; tamen secundum merita bonae voluntatis datur, quia bona voluntas, inquiunt, pracedit orantis, quam praecessit credentis, ut secundum haec merita gratia sequatur exaudientis Dei." De gratia et libero arbitrio, #27, PL, 44, 897.
  • The Semi-Pelagians added to the above list of alternatives the view that the initium fidei sometimes was due to grace and sometimes to free will.

The last of these Pelagian evasions, based on the familiar distinction between good will and good performance, St. Augustine countered with a parallel distinction between divine operation and divine cooperation. It was a complete and perfect answer. G-d cooperates with good will to give it good performance; but alone he operates on bad will to make it good; so that good will itself no less than good performance is to be attributed to the divine gift of grace. To pluck out our heart of stone and substitute a heart of flesh is, indeed, a divine operation; and since our heart of stone neither desires nor deserves such a transformation,. But when once we have willed to be good, we are not straightway saints and martyrs; we are not like St. Peter when on an inverted cross he showed that his good will had grown great and strong; we are like him when at the Last Supper he boasted his fidelity and then in the courtyard thrice denied his Lord. We have our weak and imperfect good will only to pray for strength and spiritual growth; and when in answer to our prayers G-d enables us to will so firmly that we do perform, nobiscum cooperatur. Thus G-d operates to initiate us in the spiritual life, and he cooperates to bring us to perfection; alone he works to give us good desires, and together with our good desires he labours to give us good performance.*

  • * Ibid., ## 27-33, col., 897-901.

It is to be observed that this operation and cooperation is a division neither of habitual grace nor of actual grace; it is a division simply of grace. Only in the course of the thirteenth century was the idea of habitual grace firmly established,** while the correlative concept of actual grace seems a corollary to the development of the idea of the habit.+

  • ** Contrast Clement V (DB 483 [DS 904]) with Innocent III (DB 410 [DS 780]).
  • + Dr. Landgraf affirms that the term, gratia actualis, does not occur in the whole of early scholasticism and that a host of terms such as gratia operans, praeveniens, etc., uniformly refer to justification. "Die Erkenntinis der helfenden Gnade in der Fruehscholastik," ZKT, 55 (1931), 177, 238, 403-437, 562-591 [DFG, pp. 179-184]. See below, p. 18, n.89; p.19, n.90; p.39, n.62.

But, in any case, St. Augustine in the work we are examining does not pay the slightest attention to this future development. Grace is any gratuitous gift of G-d: it is a vocation to the life of the celibate6 or the most efficacious vocation of St. Paul;7 it is forgiveness, regeneration, justification,8 but also it is the power to avoid sins in future;9 it is being a child of G-d and, as well, it is being moved by the Spirit of G-d;10 it is creation in Christ Jesus in whom all things are made new11 and no less it is aid without which we can do nothing;12 it is faith operating through charity13 but above all it is charity itself.14 Habitual and actual graces are not distinguished.

  • 6 Augustine, De grat. et lib. arb., #7, col. 886.
  • 7 Ibid., #12, col.889.
  • 8 Ibid., ## 12, 13, 14, 24, col. 889, 890, 895.
  • 9 Ibid., #26, col. 896-897.
  • 10 Ibid., #23, col.895.
  • 11 Ibid., #20, col. 893.
  • 12 Ibid., ## 10, 13, col.888, 890.
  • 13 Ibid., # 18, col. 892.
  • 14 Ibid., ## 34-40, col. 902-905.

This fact eliminates not a little of the surprise that we experience in finding the ideas of justification and of liberation from sin in the foreground when St. Augustine attempts to reconcile divine operation and human liberty. For he has no doubt that the will is free, not only when G-d cooperates with its good desires, but even when he operates good will itself, when he removes the heart of stone and inserts a heart of flesh. The prophet Ezechiel recounts, indeed, the divine promise to pluck out Israel's heart of stone, but no less does he deliver the divine command that Israel harden not its heart. How, Augustine asks, can G-d say both dabo vobis and facite vobis? Why does he give, if man is to be the maker? Or why does he command, if he himself is to be the giver? To this the answer is the celebrated paradox. The will of man is always free but not always good: either it is free from justice, and then it is evil; or it is liberated from sin, and then it is good.*

  • * Ibid., ## 29-31, col. 898-899. Ezech, 11:19-20; 18:31-32; 36:22-27.

In a sense this disjunction is a major Augustinian problem, but in a more fundamental sense it is not a problem at all. For a problem exists only if there is an intelligibility to be discovered, and to assert a problem of interpretation here, involves the assumption that the mens Augustini was a speculative system on the nature of grace and liberty. Now certainly this view has no support in the work with which we are dealing, for the De gratia et libero arbitrio was concerned not with speculation but with dogma. It was written because the prototypes of exaggerated Augustinianism, certain monks at Hadrumetum, so extolled the grace of G-d as to deny human liberty.16 It was addressed not to their understanding but to their faith; and if they failed to understand what they were to believe, they were not to dispute but to pray for light.17 The concepts employed were not the specialized products of abstract reflection but common notions to be found in Scripture and, indeed, familiar to all. There are no definitions, nor are any distinctions drawn except implicitly by the mere juxtaposition of complementary passages of Holy Writ.18 There is argument, indeed, but not philosophic argument nor any scientific ordering of thought, just triumphant rhetoric marshalling such an array of texts that the claim is obviously true, 'Not I, but Scripture itself has argued with you.' 19 The existence of human liberty is proved from revelation;20 Pelagian ideas on grace are refuted in the same manner;21 and when the ultimate problem of reconciliation is faced, St. Augustine is fully content to exclaim O altitudo with St. Paul.22

  • 16 Epist. 214, #1, PL, 44, 875.
  • 17 Ibid., #7 col.878; De grat. et lib. arb., ## 1,46, col. 881, 912.
  • 18 E.g., ibid., ## 29-31, col. 898-899.
  • 19 "... sic disputasse ut non magis ego quam divina ipsa Scriptura vobiscum locuta sit," ibid., # 41, col. 905-906.
  • 20 "Revelavit autem nobis per Scripturas suas sanctas esse in homine liberum voluntatis arbitrium." ibid., #2, col. 882.
  • 21 Ibid., ## 6-40, col. 886-905.
  • 22 Ibid., ## 44-45, col. 909-911.

Still, despite the essentially dogmatic character of the work before us, it cannot be denied that the disjunction of freedom from justice and liberation from sin is speculative in nature and intention. However abrupt, brief and paradoxical, it does aim at explaining; and similarly, throughout Augustine's many writings on grace, there is not only positive theology but also such a penetration of thought and understanding that one must affirm the development of speculative theology already to have begun. But, while we think this to be true, we also are inclined to assert that the most legitimate commentary on this initial speculation, the commentary most free from the endless vices of anachronism, is simply the history of subsequent speculation."

  • That passage [my Letter continues] may help you to understand how I cannot at this stage in my life understand for one moment how any of the sources you quote can anywhere have found evidence to validate their to me so bizarre interpretation of the mind of St. Augustine.
  • The enclosed document of my own (Integrity in Truth - Preliminary Datings, 26 February 1994), indeed, the most recent one I have written, especially some of the data included on pages 5-6, 11-12, 15-22, 25-26, 35, 39, 42, 47, 55 will indicate sufficiently in which ways, and to what degree my present journeyings interweave differently than your own with life's other spirallings as we presently experience them.
  • So much to clarify the origin and scope of my decisive response to your book two days ago. But now that I have learned what your book was not attempting to be, and also explained to you as best I briefly can why I had been inclined to hope your book would deal with matters it never was intended to mention, it remains for me to read it again, hopefully to discover why you think paradigms are, have been, or can be helpful to us in our strivings to grow in freedom as persons. I was always taught that the purpose of theology is not to study theology, but G-d with the help of theology.
  • It is high time I borrowed a leaf from the ancient Druids' Book of Wisdom and refrained from writing other than in Nature's Book of Life!
  • With prayer, blessing and best wishes!...."

 

I hoped this less incomplete response of mine to Dr. Knox's labour of love might prove to be both acceptable and helpful, but I had not dared to voice in it my main source of perplexity. In his 1988 letter to me he had made what appeared to me to be a very strange assertion: "The mutual indwelling was replaced by a separation of G-d and the world which has widened century by century so that our current materialist view is what is left when G-d has been evacuated from the world."

As a Christian experiencing and having faith in G-d as the Infinite Being, I didn't know how any reasonable person, let alone a person so clearly committed to Christian values himself as is Dr. Knox, could ever possibly think any creatures capable of separating or evacuating G-d from G-d's world!

Since in his new book (p.47) he repeats his own statement of belief in the mutual indwelling affirmed in John (10:14-15; 14:7-11.20; 15:11.23.26; & 17:21.23), something was clearly very wrong.

I embarked upon a third re-reading of the opening chapters of Changing Christian Paradigms and, at last, on 13 March, light dawned!

I had completely misunderstood the first sentence of Crawford Knox's Preface! I had wrongly assumed that because "that this is a book about [my italics] theology, religion and G-d will be obvious even to the most cursory browser," what I was beginning to read was meant to be in some sense a contribution to theology - speculative theology, or the history of theology, or the history of the development of Christian doctrine.

True, it was difficult to see what 'paradigms' have to do with theology, but that might simply mean the book would be more about bad theology than good theology. Like Gilson and many others, Knox might have fallen victim to the conceptualist error of believing that growth in understanding is the result not of the individual's improved intellectual and intentional identification with intellect's proper object (the quiddity of some sensible reality) but of taking some sort of subjective intellectual quasi-look at some mental quasi-objective abstract replica of the relevant reality (cf. Lonergan's discussion in "Metaphysics as Horizon" above referred to) .

But, of course, Knox's book is an essay in the philosophy of religion, not a contribution to theology at all. That is why he very rarely offers any Scriptural or Traditional evidence in favour of the truth of his claims, and why the book is so devoid of any attempt to generate any new speculative insights of a properly theological sort - and why, of course, he doesn't find it at all odd to refer in it, as if to acknowledged authorities, to such writers as Etienne Gilson (a historian of philosophy, not a theologian) and Dom Iltyd Trethowan (again not a theologian, but an Augustine- and Marcel-inspired Christian philosopher, whom I know, and whose position is, despite important differences in terminology, very close to my own) as if they were authorities on the historical-theological data he is philosophising about, which, of course, they would (notwithstanding their considerable familiarity with some of it) never claim to be!

Like Queen Candace's eunuch to whom G-d's Angel sent Philip (Acts 8:26-40), philosophers of religion will only be able properly to discern both the ontic truth and the saving meaning of Christian revelation by listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit within their hearts, and humbly accepting the authority without of that Faith which, as Paul teaches, normally comes there, too, ex auditu. Philosophy by itself can shed little if any light on either the truth or otherwise of this or that traditional formulation of the Christian dogma of the Holy Trinity (intellectus quaerens fidem) nor on the meaning of the technical terms used, e.g., in the Thomist* (as distinct from the merely Thomistic) speculative theology of the Trinity to illumine, by reference to the Trinity, the whole of the rest of theology and so, indeed, the whole of the rest of human knowledge and experience (fides quaerens intellectum - theologia regina scientiarum).

  • * According to Dom Bede Griffiths (The New Creation IN Christ - Christian Meditation and Community, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1992, pp. 57-8), and pace Crawford Knox whose book on philosophy of religion has been catalogued, mistakenly I believe, by the United States Congress Library as a book of doctrinal theology and history: "St. Thomas Aquinas always insisted that the world is a relationship to G-d. The world does not exist alongside G-d, the world 'here' and G-d 'there'. The world is a relationship to G-d. It exists from G-d and to G-d. It has no being in itself at all. Thus, we are very near to a kind of advaita in our basic Christian teaching." Also according to Dom Bede (o.c., p. 48): "We need today to take very seriously the view of humanity as one body, one organic whole. The Fathers had this strong sense of the Adam who is in all humanity. St. Thomas Aquinas, in a beautiful phrase, said, 'Omnes homines, unus homo,' 'All men are one man.' We are all members of that one Man who fell and became divided in conflict and confusion. Jesus restored humanity, not only Jews or Christian or any particular group, to that oneness. In the new Adam the human race becomes conscious of its fundamental unity and of its unity with the cosmos." Clearly, therefore, the Catholic Church has never, as Crawford Knox imagines, abandoned the original revelation vouchsafed to us in Christ.

Today's world, or rather, men's perceptions of it are, however, so fragmented that much strictly philosophical work often needs to be accomplished before either of these quite distinct, although not separate, theological tasks can validly be undertaken. Even then, history teaches us that success in this preliminary philosophical work is rarely achieved save by men of firm and clear Faith. Although Insight is a book of philosophy, Lonergan was a theologian, not a philosopher. Although Trethowan is a Christian philosopher in the tradition of Augustine and Marcel, he so describes himself precisely because he not only admits, but, like Cardinal Newman, insists that without the prior unmerited gift of his own direct, immediate, individual, personal experience of G-d, no amount of philosophising would lead him in any direction he would like to go!

It may well be that Augustine was unduly critical of Pelagius, because Augustine was ignorant of the Druid apophatic yet, I would say, Catholic (in Augustine's own sense of that primordially significant term) Way of Truth Pelagius reflected, but that, as they say, is another story!

Amydon-Exeter, Monday 14 March 1994

 

 

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