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The Anima Mundi

Content mirrors form. The chiasmic connection between immortality and mortality that we meet in Heraclitus is not merely coincidental. What we find here is more explicitly mirrored in perhaps the most difficult passage in Plato—Timaeus 35a–37b—in which the formation of the World Soul (psychē kosmou, anima mundi) is described as the very link between the eternal and the transient. [6] In this most alchemical of Plato’s dialogues, the indivisible (the ‘circle of the same’) is linked to the divisible (‘the circle of difference’) via what he calls ‘the best of possible bonds’ (desmōn de kallistos). When the two circles, which do not want to join, are united, their point of union forms an x or cross (chi). This chiasmus defines the paradoxical juncture of spirit and matter, fire and earth. It is the spiritual point in the material world and the material point in the spiritual world.

In Platonic cosmology, the demiurge or divine artisan brings the infinite and the finite together to form a single point, and the result is the World Soul. In other words, this absolute chiasmic juncture is the very thing that animates the world (anima mundi). The world soul, moreover, is mirrored in the Platonic conception of the embodied soul, which is precisely conceived as a mean term between the divine and the human. It puts human perception in a privileged but also torn condition, enabling perspective on both the metaphysical and the physical worlds.

Through its ‘counter-stretched harmony’, the taut and tensile human psychē mirrors the macrocosmic chiasmus. Herein, the tension that mitigates against unity is secretly vital to its greater integrity. Like the dissonant seventh in musical harmony, tension anticipates the resolution of the fundamental tonos in the octave, while simultaneously maintaining perfect distance and equilibrium. Like the divine artisan, the human soul must not only wed the eternal to the transient, it must comprehend life’s grandest structures through its most contradictory details. Like the artisan, the artist embraces contradiction to encompass the feeling of infinity.

The counter-stretched nature of creation was sensed very keenly in modern times by Andrei Tarkovsky, the great Russian filmmaker who likened film to ‘sculpting in time’, and directing to literally being able to ‘separate light from darkness’ and ‘dry land from the waters’ (Genesis 1: 9–18).‘The work of art’, remarks Tarkovsky, ‘lives and develops, like any other natural organism, through the conflict of opposing principles’.

Hideousness and beauty are contained within each other. This prodigious paradox, in all its absurdity, leavens life itself, and in art makes that wholeness in which harmony and tension are unified. The image makes palpable a unity in which manifold different elements are contiguous and reach over into each other. […] The idea of infinity cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible. The absolute is only attainable through faith and in the creative act.

(Image: Arthea (Elena Frasca Odorizzi)

Proceeding through opposition, art makes infinity tangible. All authentic ars, all traditional technē, seek to render the universal creative act present through finite creation. Here, we take ars and technē in their archaic senses, in which both ‘art’ and ‘craft/technology’ were not dualised, but were each seen to participate in the divine intelligence (nous, epistemē, scientia), and by virtue of this were distinguished from artless labour (atechnos tribē). According to the medieval dictum ars sine scientia nihil (art is nothing without knowledge), no separation was made between a work of art per se and ordinary, ‘utilitarian’ objects, as is the case in the modern world; rather, handcrafted objects were not soullessly manufactured, but transformed into works of art through the very act ofpoēsis (creation). They were vivified, hence life-giving. The false dichotomy between high art and low technology has come about precisely because manufactured objects (cheirotechnē) are no longer made by hand: they have lost their soul, their animating connection to the human and transcendent. As the Alsatian Hermetic philosopher, René Schwaller de Lubicz, once remarked:

If someone were to tell you that mechanised civilisation clouds the soul, this would be an affirmation without practical impact. On the other hand, if I say to you that mechanised civilisation clouds and even kills consciousness, you will comprehend this warning: if between yourself and the object of your labour you interpose an automatic tool which eliminates your will and above all your sensibility, all living contact between you and the fashioned material is cut off. The artisan no longer ‘feels’ (sent) and no longer comprehends the wood, the leather, the metal, his work is inanimate; it cannot emanate nor radiate any life for it has not received any. You must then resort to analyses, to statistical studies of the qualities of the material relinquished to the automatism of the machine, for you have stretched a veil between yourself and the thing; and although the thing subsists, you—the conscious living being—lose your life by suffocating your consciousness. It is the same with the doctor, who must sympathetically feel (éprouver) his patient’s illness, or otherwise become a mechanic. Observe the phases of history: the most fruitful, the most genial and the most ‘living’ epochs have always had a flourishing community of artisans. The Consciousness of a people can only be renewed through the crafts and not through doctrines. Mechanised civilisation is the agony of the world.

Plato, as Coomaraswamy reminds us, ‘knows nothing of our distinction of fine from applied arts. For him painting and agriculture, music and carpentry and pottery are all equally kinds of poetry or making’ (poēsis).

Ars and technē thus conceived are not merely mirrors or simulacra, but instruments and instances of creation, of making infinity tangible. Creation, in this sense, is regarded as continuous and ever-present, and all true creativity is thus participation in the ever-presence of origin. The artist creates an image of the absolute, according to Tarkovsky, and ‘through the image is sustained an awareness of the infinite: the eternal within the finite, the spiritual within matter, the limitless given form’. The animating paradox at the heart of life is thus the hidden ferment through which harmony and tension are unified.

(Source: aaroncheak.com)