Hortus Conclusus

My knowledge of Asiatic religious traditions is really not derived from books. Books were always only capable of renewing my rational contact with what I had known spiritually a long time ago. Yet I know of the tendency of individual Europeans, who have their knowledge from books, to treat ancient eastern religious documents and prayer books as though they were psychological revelations, and to use them to confirm their own hypotheses. – But I also know how big a part overestimation plays in adding weight to such an assessment, and that for the most part reverence is being shown to ‘misrepresentations’ of false or half-understood religious speculations, along with fantasies about an ancient time which scarcely permit verification. It is also not possible to see why more wisdom should be revealed if in an Asiatic mystic text the same is said as Eckhart, Tauler and the Frankfurt Teutonic knight formulated within European culture, or what, for instance, Angelus Silesius meant with the famous line:

   “Heaven is in you – and also the hellish state: – what you choose and want, – such will be your fate!”…

   Certainly there is no doubt that the same truth is occasionally revealed from a completely new perspective if one is suddenly faced with the version which it took in a most remote culture. This is primarily the practical significance of those texts from religious worlds in the interior of Asia which are becoming more accessible to Europeans. The main value conveyed in translation is not the dogma of eastern religious systems, already well known in their tendencies, but the forms different versions of knowledge of an inherently non-dogmatic kind take, which is also far from being denied to ancient European religious culture. They can lead to most significant impulses, and give genuine importance to the recently discovered ancient eastern religious tradition.

  In those Asiatic religious systems which have grown in the soil of India, or are influenced by India, the becoming conscious of the eternal is striven for through a kind of internal play of the soul, in which man is simultaneously actor and spectator, by representing within himself his godheads, and by experiencing them  with all the weight of his own self-assuredness depending on his nature, as alive and connected with himself, – if not achieving even complete subjective identification, – (think, for example, of Râmakrishna!). On the other hand, theEuropean has, since ancient times, pursued a diametrically opposed form of religious striving, naturally established in his own character, by seeking to experience himself: – ‘man’ – in the divine. It is very noticeable that Islam which also seems to us to be so ‘oriental’ belongs to this tendency. But primarily Christianity in all its forms – where it is experienced consistently – is this kind of religious experience of primordial ‘man’ concealed in the Godhead by the Godhead! Truly: – an ‘anthropomorphism’ of the sort flesh and blood by themselves alone could not suggest to those fettered to the earthly animal!

  One can attain experience of the eternal in both the Asiatic and European ways, but in both this supreme experience, which is possible to earthly man during the life of his body, remains reserved only to those who are capable of cutting a way through the thorny overgrowth of wild roses which dogmatism has cultivated for centuries, until they reach the innermost truth: – to the clear knowledge of what the creators of dogma actually sought to protect but, with the best of intentions, resulted in complete abandonment to overgrowth. The Asiatic will do best, however, – excluding individual exceptions of very different merit – to adhere to his Asiatic ways, with sober appreciation of his characteristics, and the European to his European ways, whenever earthly man wants to attain true experience of eternity. For these two essentially different ways are psychologically and physically established and in no sense represent, so to speak, arbitrarily arrived at ‘methods’.  It is neither possible to join together the two approaches, nor can a change be made from one to the other if the goal which is ultimately common to both is actually to be reached.

   Surely no one will be unclear even for a moment that the European way of attaining experience of eternity is taught by me.

Nonetheless, it is enriched by everything of the eastern tradition which can be ‘amalgamated’ to the European way. This, of course, does not ‘contradict’ the afore-mentioned impossibility of combining both approaches or cultivating one or the other at random. And it would be just as possible to make a teaching from the Asiatic way more fruitful by enriching it from the tradition of European experience. If one as a European, also has the experience that at times “what is genuine is thinly sowed” and deeply ‘hidden’ within the Asiatic texts, whilst “everywhere the negative lies incomprehensibly rigid on the surface”, one must in no way infer from this experience values which remain inaccessible to a European. It would be scarcely any different with the European religious tradition, were an Asiatic to seek to pursue the current traces of genuine experience of eternity in Europe…

   What is often experienced as ‘demonic’, however, is the evident practical occultism, innate in land and blood, found in the whole religious tradition of Asia, which for people in the east represents more a realm of physics and is not experienced by those familiar with it as ‘uncanny’ in our sense. As long as this occult practice moves along tracks determined by religion, it is still kept in check by religion and so is regarded even by those who are elevated spiritually high above it, as harmless. Only when occultism in Asia becomes a ‘religion’ in itself can it be called ‘demonic’ in a menacing sense! –

  One should approach the religious texts of the Orient more freely and separate more resolutely the wheat from the chaff, the more so as the best, the most precious and the most mysterious that Asia preserves have never been written down while the few manuscripts from which these things could be inferred most certainly never fall into the hands of non-Asians.