Francesco Sartori
Venice, Italy
A NEW MYSTICAL AND METAPHYSICAL POETRY
BETWEEN ÉRŌS, AGÁPĒ AND THÁNATOS
Abstract: Mystical language and the ineffable — the mutation of érōs into thánatos — historical nihilism as denial of human destiny — the dimensions of agápē — thánatos and némesis — the realism of the mystic — poetic language and self-referentiality in contemporary literature — The Via Crucis — the Via Lucis — the Via Pulchritudinis and hesychasm.
Keywords: poetry, mysticism, literature, metaphysics, philosophy, communication, linguistics.
1. Mystical Language and the ineffable
The poet speaks with his verses. To others and in others, the fulfillment and extrinsic of the hermeneutic experience they elicit. Beyond the logical and poetic word, which is the latter, in its introduction, there is only ineffable silence, as Wittgenstein had understood well [1].
Therefore, with extreme modesty and ill-concealed reluctance, I attempt to hint in a few lines at the weltanschauung, the vision underlying the literary works I have so far compiled by declining them into seven poetic anthologies.
With the compilation “Ignudi naufraghi fra Samo e Patmos” (Buck-naked Castaways between Samos and Patmos), I narrate the paradox of a man who discovers himself naked and bankrupt before himself and his loved one and in cosmic reality, where he finds himself thrown by an indecipherable fate.
2. The mutation of érōs into thánatos
Érōs, in its Platonic sense, finds its fatal and tragic conclusion in the experience of total failure, or thánatos.
Failure that is, yes, denoted by the inherent biological and psychological communicative limitation inherent in the human, yet nevertheless, it is failure first existential and then ontological: I cite in metaphor the island of Samos, first conflictual inhabited and contested, then abandoned and deserted.
Danced shipwreck [2]
White inlay chisels the face,
now worn-out chasing spaces
thin among the intertwined stars, buried
foreboding still filled with heartbreak,
I hear the voice that intoxicates me slowly
And enchants the last note in absorbed
silence, almost a danced shipwreck
On sunny rocks of the twisted heart…
And already it rises the sky and embroiders
slight to the east wind the sigh
Ancient to weave the clear night.
Your image burns bitterly,
as soon as it pulls over infer the breath
as sharp to the lips as a blade.
In the knowledge that finitude is not hideable or surmountable through any communicative or pseudo-religious artifice, I cry out that not only is life hopelessly united with death, but that death itself is the aim of life and, as Heidegger states, is its only axiomatic certainty [3]. These screeches are meant to be a global contestation against certain contemporary cultures, its overweening certainty that it can guide history and human destiny toward a future of paradisiacal technocratic and transhumanist phosphorescence.
No. History is not made by us (alone). The universe neither made itself nor continues to make itself. We are immersed in a whirlpool of dust. Although we are erotic animals before rational animals, we can neither love nor know anything that does not eventually turn into emptiness and does not return to the nothingness from which it inscrutably arose. This radical nihilist experience immediately falsifies any scientist, neo-positivist, or neo-relativist arrogance that seems to reign in our pan-technological anthropocentric culture.
On the other hand, the avowed weak thought [4], an assumption that contradicts itself precisely in the fortress of its axiomatic incompleteness, reveals that the so-called contemporary nihilism conceals an underground will to power, a will to autonomous destruction and recreation from nothingness, to impose a sense on the scale of situational man, mirroring his mutability, dictated by the necessary fatality of carpe diem. The cul-de-sac of sophism and an ontological neo-nominalism recurs today in its most titanic and universal implication.
I intend to experientially refute this nihilism. Nothing is something else. Nothing is the whole universe as it is lived and experienced daily by man, who is not at all the center of it, however weak, but rather an insubstantial and extreme periphery. Albert Camus’s myth of Sisyphus is emblematic of our despairing existential status [5].
It is precisely the skin-to-skin experience of nothingness and the consciousness of the semantic unknowability of Being, indeed the discovery that the Heideggerian dasein, the being-with, is, in fact, a being-with-nothing, that led me to curse life and its absurd deceptions, but at the same time, instinctively, to seek with all my might a landing place for the shipwrecked soul torn apart by a yearning thirst for light and absolute love. For just as the shadow is nothing but would not even be that if it were not the absence of the whole that looms outward from itself, so this insatiable thirst for love, for light, for truth, for justice is a testimony that beyond the darkness there can exist something or Someone to strive for, even in the gasps of misery and abandonment [6].
Whirlpools [7]
language
twists corroded teeth
cyanogen spectra
as events
crippled and cruel
… dreamy foreboding veiled …
foreign body
translucent follies
overflowing
compartments
smoky seasons
reclaimers
arise
sucked in
in drunken eddies
of limits
caves
chains
arid sand
where to proliferate
buck-naked.
The torment of living then opens to the Mystery. The Nothing becomes maieutic to Mystery [8], to a Presence-Absence that weaves the plot of history without our knowledge and makes us shipwrecked, yes, but for the sole purpose of making us land on Neverland first and now suddenly appears, where we are finally given to open our eyes to a deciphered sky: the island of Patmos, the island of ultimate revelation, of apocalyptic revelation, of the final meaning of the history of each of us and of the cosmos.
Fourth space [9]
Endless moaning
Unrolling ancient scrolls,
no longer vibrating incantations
Beyond recondite hedges.
us
progeny
hoard
at the foot of the invisible,
severed
the language
from the ineffable verb
we dared
bewitch
life
in the glowing
boulders of Sisyphus…
… and the magma
consumed the top,
last holocaust
before being kidnapped
In the absolute cloister.
Hence arises the awe of the unknown, the total harmony that perhaps dwells in dimensions hidden from the senses and even the most sublime erotic love. Not the beyond man of Nietzschean memory, but the most human that mutates into the divine, being evoked by Someone whom the Nothingness projects into the soul and carves it out in our seemingly absurd everyday life. Through my texts, I intend to testify precisely that we alone cannot reach any safe harbor if we are not enlightened and guided by an Other, who unexpectedly becomes our traveling companion and transforms the malaise of living into a flourishing desert where we discover the signs, the preludes of an apocalyptic personal and cosmic palingenesis.
Palingenesis [10]
where are you? … where are you?
lost love
in this sunset
Of terrestrial life,
crucifix
drips outcast
on blankets of sand
for men dust
murderous gentlemen
Of this universe!
Crumples pregnant
between laid projects
this lowest being,
Cain of God,
And now your blood
glossy reverberates
In the alchemical hybrids of idolatrous íbris,
In the unlikely vessel of the servants of téchne,
In Humans violated by global rostrums.
And you are
Beyond the glare of altered genes,
Beyond the shipwreck of broken dreams,
Beyond the cries of bitten babies.
In the heart
burning in silence.
Repulse
o Pneũma!
In khrónos veins, transforms
the feral howling of érōs
In a divine gush of agápē!
……………………..
… reweaving
the word
carved
since ever
in the belly
of promised lands,
recovering
aromas
along shores
soaked
of tears,
until
we will not burn
at the call
living
of your lament,
looks
fixed
on the wires
of the firmament,
amazed
to glimpse you
crossed wood
between Orion
and the Pleiades,
immaculate
sign
— open seal —
resurfaced
Lógos
primordial.
3. Historical nihilism as a denial of human destiny
Our path, however, is arduous, especially when light is absent at greater or lesser intervals in personal and collective history. A man repeatedly plunges into pride and the presumption of self-sufficiency, claiming that only science and technology would free us from death, pain, and the struggle of living. And so, we flow into aestheticizing hedonism as the existential stamp of humanity that even today is still trying to overcome the human, as some maîtres à penser like Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, the Frankfurt School … to name a few.
But the Other, who also charts our course by means of eros, flashes a different metaphysical Light in our eyes, in the existential concreteness of everyday life. This light points us to the eschatological Source of life, which gives itself freely in the divine and incarnate Agápē.
Unreflecting shadows of eternity [11]
Circles in the sky,
Shudders of the time that winds,
omen of the irreversible end
Of your braided hair of fairy tales,
Of your and our universe.
At last,
…Turn your eyes inward!
Dementias in retaliation
To thoughts that surpass inhumanly
The threshold of the unspeakable.
And yet, I continue to live amazed
the nonlinearity of the horizon
Pulsing within each new intercourse
(or a new deception?!):
inextricable text,
spider’s web rewoven with stubbornness
by time-sick hearts.
Or…
… sudden intrigue of Agápē,
paced by brambles
and conducted by Whom,
hanging from two wooden perpendicular planks,
rejoins the hinges of the Cosmos
and cuts the Gordian knot
of the feral mimetic dance,
Chaste by letting his throat be slit:
The Logos-Bloodshed,
insufflated Spirit,
finally illuminates
this cavern of shadows
Irreflective of eternity!
For Love is stronger than death… (cf. SS 8:6-7) and holds out to us an intrigue of Agápē (understood as disinterested, gratuitous love, which requires and expects no reciprocation). This is how we can take back our eternal destiny, which instead is continually denied by those who would have us reduced to the present, synchronic, fleeting moment only, thus annihilating our historical dimension and the diachronic human familiarity that we can call Tradition, biological, cultural, and spiritual.
4. The Dimensions of Agápico Love
What force, what energy holds together our Tradition, in the diachronic sense expressed above, with the synchronic traditions of the human family? Also, from my personal experience, I can say that this Energy [12] is the Love of God embodied in our history. In my work “The Mutations of Love,” [13] I deal metaphorically with «the physical states of Love,» borrowing from the Physics of Matter the various forms of aggregation and molecular motility determined mainly by the external and internal temperature of multiple bodies, particularly water. Of the latter, I have used only the standard states known to most: liquid, gaseous (evaporated), solid (frozen), and sublimate (other states, not only physical, are found described in the titles of individual compositions). I refer to a transformation process in these metaphors, such as evaporation and/or distillation. This is why I ultimately refer to Mutations. Because, as we shall see later, these are not mere formal changes of matter but epiphanic (today, we would say phenotypic or epigenetic) mutations of subsistent Love.
“Amor ch’a nullo amato amar perdona” [14]
I loved Love,
too little.
I was seduced,
too often.
In the end, the Lover
Came to visit me:
Into pain.
Quotidie, vulnus.
I accept to die of love.
It is my destiny written.
Before the time of Light
Would blind my wounded heart
By its pierced spiral Wind.
5. Thánatos and némesis.
Here the second interpretive paradigm enters: if in the book Mystical Dance [15] I referred only to two semantic areas of Love, in the classical Greek and κοινῇ [16] also Jewish-Christian meaning: ἔρως καί ἀγάπη [17]; in this Anthology another existential-metaphysical duality, no less critical for the spiritual and cultural-artistic evolution of the world derived from classical Greek and Latin civilization, enters into discriminating play: ἔρως καί θάνατος [18].
Indeed, the originality of the Sylloge is in having intimately amalgamated these three dimensions of the spirit: ἔρως — ἀγάπη — θάνατος. This trilogy reflects the contradictory and imploding humanity that lives around and within us, with varied and increasingly frequent resonances Νέμεσις [19].
All of this being premised, the compositions, while not denying intimism, symbolism, hermeticism, structuralism, etc., attempt to trace a Beyond, linking personal experience to universal hermeneutics, recovering metaphysics, religious sciences, and the epistemology of everyday living that unconsciously resonates in the universe. Our every action has a repercussion that returns and evolves not only on the individual who generated it but on the entire cosmos (animate and not, although the latter are now obsolete distinctions).
In these texts, Love with a capital initial stands for ἀγάπη, while the all lowercase term, barring grammatical and syntactical requirements, stands for ἔρως.
What about the θάνατος? … It is intersected with each poem, stanza, verse, word …
And here we come to the crucial point. Heidegger, as we specified above, said that the only existential certainty man has is that he must die. From this, he would build his whole philosophy. But on closer inspection, if a philosophy starts from death, where can it take us? To metaphysical Death: to absolute and apodictically contradictory relativism. At the socio-individual suicide level, to the death of the thirst for the Infinite and Art as its expression.
In fact, never is θάνατος and its surrogates present. A humanity that does not believe in Nothing is destined for Nothing: no Love, no Happiness, no Life, no nothing—just brute force trying to impose its own will. Good is the satisfaction of my desire or what I believe to be good for me or, even worse, for others, beyond the good and evil of Nietzschean memory [20], with the aftermath of violence and overpowering abuses at all ontological, existential, and situational levels.
This Sylloge would presuppose a critical edition, almost stanza by stanza, as it implies analytical knowledge and synthetic understanding of metaphysical, theological, physical-biological, logical-mathematical, biblical-religious strictu sensu, literary, and mythological references crossed and intersecting in n-dimensional teleology’s.
Last but not least is the correlation between θάνατος and the Death on the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Here, the invisible tangent to pre-Christian historical cyclicality impacts with a perfect orthogonality that captures and annihilates it in Aeternum.
For me René Girard is the cryptic author of this conception. He unveils θάνατος (according to Christian originality conception). He lays the gnoseological and salvific-historical premises to put an end to its mimetic crises, pointing precisely to the Cross as the new way to Light and ἀγάπη, “L’Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” [21].
Children of Eternal Love [22]
Khrónos, devourer of children,
we are already in your jaws
And tight in tangles,
We ignore other voices.
I look at you spellbound,
multicolored sunset:
already pinkish
blood slows down
as a fluid
which will soon freeze
In the diachronic swallowing.
An icy furnace your throat.
But a song rises to Heaven
and unmistakable notes of Light
They suddenly open a Way.
Because my Name is Eternal
And I am not your son,
Or khrónos: idol of Nothingness.
I am the Son of Eternal Love,
Than in his infinite happiness,
Has wanted to shine it again,
even more splendid,
In a child’s face.
In the most remote corner
Of your clay-footed empire.
6. The Realism of the Mystic
Poetry is not an escape into unrealistic and irrational fantasy, disengaged from the reality in which we live. The Poet’s foot is firmly planted on the ground. At the same time, his mind rises to the highest heaven, hidden from most, but only to receive the profound meaning of existing and being a man immersed in a universe filled with direct and indirect messages. These messages are more than mere Gnostic communications; they are instead part of a higher harmony that is revealed in the astonishing beauty of the created universe.
Nature, emotions, culture, and feelings constitute the «heart and circadian rhythms» of the cosmic life of which we are a part and which the Creator Being, in His infinite Wisdom, Love, and Rationality, has placed in our immortal soul.
The Artist is a speck of this infinity of Love, entrusted with the mission of transmitting the «Heart of Life» to his fellow human beings through language, in a broad sense.
In particular, the Artist-Poet is a demiurge of oral and written language, conveying the wonder of daily living as a living in the absolute eternity of the present moment, merging the synchronic with the diachronic. In the smallness of the gestures and situations that reality proposes to us, the Poet sees the reverberation of the infinite, in the diversity, the exaltation of the One that gives us a Life without limits in Truth, Goodness, and precisely in Beauty, which summarizes in itself the first two archetypal concepts.
In the penultimate anthology, “Light from Light,” [23] I recall and further develop the general Poetics described earlier [24]. I consistently intend to take the next step: the concrete anthropological and socio-environmental one. θάνατος (death) here hovers even more prominently and seems to win the challenge with Άγάπη (Love). But it does not.
The last stanza of the composition «Honor to a Homeless Man» reveals this in its contingent and seemingly contradictory experience. Even the most desperate and derelict man has a single and ultimate referent and source of Life: the Lord of the Living, Our Lord Jesus Christ in Eternity.
Honor to a homeless person! [25]
I knocked on a thousand doors tonight,
Blind pilgrim of pity.
None!
I have already sunk in the bosom of the earth.
Singing between sidewalks:
life
of a man
friendless.
O evil pain,
that you cringe
existence
Of those who cannot grasp
the spring preludes.
Your echo reverberates
Among the reeds beaten by the mistral
And it is lost,
Like a deadly pestilence,
Among the silted cypress trees.
I plunged back into the night.
Groggily, I waited.
None!
I have already sunk in the bosom of the earth.
And the bed of the dying
He embraced me coldly.
In a recondite cubicle
on the ancient Appian Way
I slipped in
in a hidden
arcosolium.
And you immediately came.
To embrace me,
Lord of the Living.
7. Poetic Language and self-referentiality
While it is true that poetic language has universal characteristics that go beyond individual adherences or visions of faith, it cannot and should not suppress them in the name of sentimental syncretism and emotional relativism. Nor can nor should it manipulate language in the name of a one-sided ideological faith that looks solely to the human, secretly placing it in the reader’s attention as the only tangible and affectively worthy god of veneration. Human language would fall and does fall in much contemporary literature, into self-referentiality and the new communicative mannerism, linked to all those circles hinging on «physical and mental well-being,» «motivational and inspirational research,» etc., for even very material and egocentric ends: success, career, wealth, leadership, “ecstatic enlightenment,” of implicit and explicit Orientalizing import and, in varying degrees, linked to the New Age and the new atheistic, modernist and globalist humanism of ancient esoteric matrix.
8. The Via Lucis (The Way of Light)
The Way to Light, on the other hand, is not easily recognized. It passes through cracks and narrow doors…it is a gift from Above rather than a human achievement on its own or induced by miraculous techno-robotic feats commanded by an Artificial Intelligence, which is nothing but the collectivized and idolized human mind, synchronically and diachronically, that proposes itself as the only valid object of faith, with pseudo-religious semiotic motions. Instead, the Poems I write are the expression of immanence, often tragic, that manages to transcend itself through a centripetal drive, where the central point of attraction is not the earth and human adventure but is God himself and his human compassion to the end of identification with the victim … sacrificial, to reawaken the germ or, rather, the divine/luminous principle (the arkhḗ) that dwells within us. This divine spark is manifested within us but does not generate itself, nor can it reinvigorate its flame without acceptance and complete reliance on the burning Divine Love. This is the ultimate meaning of “Light from Light”: those who live in Love sing it in every moment of the day. Then Poetry becomes a Hymn of Praise, a Hymn of Life, a Hymn of Thanksgiving (the linguistic form of the salvific Eucharist): astonished Thanksgiving for so much Goodness, Truth and Beauty given to us by God.
You are shining body in the dark [26]
You are shining body in the dark,
Embrace of the one Bridegroom.
You, nectar at our banquet,
Silence of God incarnate.
You are the fast-flowing blood,
You are meat that always leavens,
you are the last form of Man
You are Earth living in Heaven.
You, the womb of ancient sighs,
You give us the deep Light,
Vibrating in the only intercourse
Of the resurrected Cosmos in the Son.
To the Father let praise be lifted up
Of the body, waiting for the voice
Of the Son, who comes in the hour
Of lighting the Night Light.
9. Love betrayed and rediscovered:
Hesychasm and contemplative silence.
Nonetheless, one cannot help but observe the contradiction we encounter in our itinerary with the harsh reality of Love betrayed and vilified, when not reduced to a mask of hatred and what is not Love, neither human nor even less divine.
Somebody, please respond! [27]
Unholy travesty staged
On the skin of helpless wanderings.
How can inhuman bestiaries
make violent pacts
Toward helpless hearts?
Someone de Profundis
Answer to the blood of Abel!
Because grim eyes of hate
incinerate the future
And slowly they bury
Adam’s wretched lineage.
Ouch! …
… What curse
chases us hissing
deadly illusions?
Somebody, please respond!
Somebody broke out the arm
And wield the ancient Wisdom!
Let the Light be…
… again and Last Word
so be it!
Then the Lover
will conceive
divine offspring …
… in silence, it will rise
the heavenly seed
In the bosom of the Theotókos.
This personal and social historical tragedy is the meaning of the title chosen for my latest sylloge: «love not love.» In it, I intend to denote the illogicality and meaninglessness into which our personal, social, and cultural existence has plunged. Indeed, we live today in a liquid society and culture where concepts merge, words take on transversal meanings, and feelings and emotions intersect in a cognitive and psychic fog unprecedented in human history.
This fog envelops and confuses us, causing us to lose sight of what is true and authentic. Love seems to have become an elusive and ambiguous concept when not an actual mask. We no longer know how to distinguish between true and false love, between deep love and love of convenience and superficiality, perhaps because authentic love has dissipated in a welter of frenzied drives and uncontrollable desires.
Relationships are increasingly based on surreptitious demiurgic manipulations driven by all-pervasive and often subliminal media mimesis, rather than on deep and authentic feelings.
The words “I love you” are pronounced without real meaning, becoming mere formulas of courtesy or latches to take possession of the other person, annihilating their differences and specificities. Love thus turns into a game of power and self-interest instead of a sincere and mutual relationship.
This semantic indeterminacy is also reflected in our culture, where traditional values are being challenged and social norms are constantly being redefined. We no longer know which rules to follow, which behaviors are acceptable, and which boundaries to respect.
In this liquid society [28], we are forced to navigate by sight amid daily uncertainties and search for a sense of stability and authenticity amidst the ebbs and storms that overlap at every juncture of our destiny. Love not Love; thus, it becomes a way to express this confusion and inner search. Indeed, we long for a love that is true and sincere, that stands out beyond the existential fog that obscures our days.
But how can we find this authentic love in such a chaotic world? Perhaps the answer lies in listening to our hearts and following our deepest desires. Only then can we hope to find a love that is truly love, capable of giving us happiness and wholeness? The answer seems obvious: yes!
But perhaps it is not.
Go where your heart takes you [29] … is a shortcut and a romantic and sentimental trap that disregards the fundamental anthropological question: Who are we, men and women? What is our origin? What is our purpose in the universe? Why do our desires and drives tend to guide us in an almost always blind and compulsive way?
These are the questions that need to be answered so that we can verify that the heart leads us to where our true ultimate good resides: authentic love grounded in the truth of our being. In fact, without a clear anthropological vision, we run into the whirlwind of involutional mutations, not, as so much literature falsely projects, evolutionary or progressive ones.
Having annihilated the fecundity of love by separating sexuality from its generative end; having disarticulated the marriage thalamus, in its historical and legal expression, from its natural heterosexual matrix; the breaking down of sexuality, ordered to total and totalizing love, into a spasmodic shattering of neuro-motor pleasures, has produced a grotesque society, capable only of the self-satisfaction of its psychosexual drives, beyond the medium, whether human or artificial or transgender and transhuman, used. And so ready-to-wear sensual pleasure has replaced divine and human Love, enthroning itself as the new false idol to which to sacrifice life.
The verses that I have collected in this latest sylloge are the question of truth that has always accompanied me and the attempt to clarify the heart’s desire constantly oriented toward the true Light, which is then the only real answer to our tormented and seemingly absurd navigation among the waves, to which we ourselves, Promethean apprentice sorcerers, have chastened ourselves as novel Sisyphuses [30], to find ourselves now as rari nantes in gurgite vasto [31]. Only a vast and complete personal and collective purification can restore us to Life as God conceived it at the beginning of creation.
Bloody water
With what water
can you wash me
Lord?
Only the bloody water
of your side ripped open
by my spear.
In the water sprinkled
of Love lost and found
will my soul be cleansed…
And so, from the earth
I will be reborn eternal in You.
10. The Via Crucis (The Way of the Cross)
Nemesis, in fact, has confounded our superb minds, and now we are in social and cultural disarray and in the grip of spiritual apathy. And in these eddies and engorges, black holes of reason and soul, we are aided, yes, by poetic inspiration and art in general, which, however, must be filtered and evaluated because it often comes from another dimension. Indeed, this otherworldly and spiritual dimension turns out to be inhabited not only by benevolent entities and powers, but also by presences that would like to see us even further removed from the Light of the one beacon and guide of life that is God’s Love, revealed definitively in the divine incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, and in his death on the cross, a redemptive and atoning sacrifice that broke once and for all the destructive mimesis that enchained us to the dark distance from God [32].
Only in the Light of God, the origin and end of Life, can we too walk on the stormy waters to the safe landing place where Love, Peace, and Happiness dwell in fullness, stable and converging with those of all other people who have lived, are alive and will live forever. For the heart of our being is made for eternity, and only in divine Love does it find fulfillment.
11. The Via Pulchritudinis (The Way of Beauty) and Hesychasm.
Here, then, is the placing of my poetics in the time of the human’s deconstruction in a literary and existential perspective that starts from the fragmentary and multiple every day to the Eternal One, from psycho-social dissipation to the rediscovery of the meaning and purpose of personal, collective, and universal history.
The linguistic and poetic medium I propose is a form of the Via Pulchritudinis, of the itinerary toward the beauty of God from the beauty of the cosmos created [33]. This Way flows into Apophatic Silence and Hesychasm, already traveled and experienced by our early Fathers in the Common Faith, Eastern Orthodox, and Latin Catholic, and transmitted to us in the great Ancient Jewish and Greco-Latin cultural, philosophical, theological, and mystical Tradition.
Heaven is silent
Aphonic
the night
overflows with silence…
Poor blinded eyes
encrusted
with ancestral scales.
And be the Light
now as it was then,
when it all began….
And Heaven will sprinkle
the waiting Earth.
The new seed
will germinate silently.
[1] Ludwig Wittgenstein (Vienna, April 26, 1889 — Cambridge, April 29, 1951) avidly read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, and Augustine. The Austrian philosopher writes in Tractatus logico-philosophicus at No. 6.432 about the Mystic: “Not how the world is, is the mystic, but that it is. To intuit the world sub specie aeterni is to intuit it as the limited all. To sense the world as all limited is the mystic”. In No. 6.522, he specifies, “There is indeed some ineffable. It shows itself, it is the mystic”. “Thus, the mystic represents the ineffable, the sense of the Mystery that pervades the world understood as a limited whole, and that occupies the highest aspects of life which, not being factual, cannot be said, this is not to say that they cannot in any way be dealt with, but they show themselves. The mystic is thus a complementary figure to that of the scientist who describes natural phenomena and to that of the philosopher who clarifies and shows the limits of language to free thought from its traps and enable a change in man’s form of life, because we all, according to Wittgenstein, fall into linguistic traps and therefore need philosophy as therapy, therapy necessary to free ourselves from the linguistic labyrinth” (cf. Giordano Domenico Gabriele, Ludwig Wittgenstein e il senso dell’ineffabile in Ivan Pozzoni (ed.), Frammenti di filosofia contemporanea VIII, Limina Mentis, Villasanta (MB — Italy), 2015, pp. 47-48.
[2] Francesco Sartori, Ignudi naufraghi fra Samo e Patmos, Phasar, Florence, 2006, p. 35.
[3] “Death is a possibility of being that the Being itself must always assume for itself. In death, Essence looms over itself in its most proper being-possibility. In this possibility, there goes for Essence purely and simply of its being in the world. Death is, in Essence, the possibility of no-more-being. Since in this possibility, Essence looms over itself, it is completely postponed to its own more proper being possibility. In this looming of Essence to itself, all relations with other Essences are diluted” (M. Heidegger, Being and Time, ed. it. edited by F. Volpi on the version by P. Chiodi, Milan, Longanesi, 2006, § 50.
[4] Gianni Vattimo, a leading exponent of weak thought with Emanuele Severino, writes in The End of Modernity (1985), «The postmodern experience of truth is an aesthetic experience.» For Vattimo, «thought has reached the end of its metaphysical adventure. By now, a philosophy that demands certainty and unique foundations for theories about man, God, history, and values is no longer proposable. The crisis of foundations has now shaken the very idea of truth: the once clear and distinct evidence has become blurred. From Aristotle to Kant, philosophy is prime knowledge at its most authentic core. With Nietzsche and Heidegger, the idea of philosophy as foundational knowledge has vanished …» (cf. Fusaro Diego at https://www.filosofico.net/vattimo2.htm).
[5] Albert Camus, Il mito di Sisifo, Bompiani, Milano, 2001.
[6] Cf. Psalm 50.
[7] Francesco Sartori, op. cit., p. 50.
[8] I take up the profound meaning of the apophatic experience experienced and described in the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, Meister Eckhart, and Nicholas Cusano. If for Platonism, the impossibility of knowing God is grounded in the receptacle of the body in which man is imprisoned after the «fall» and which precludes him from any possibility of spiritual knowledge, Christian apophaticism attests that knowledge of God is closely connected with his revelation; from this perspective, apophaticism never resolves itself into a form of agnosticism, on the contrary, it saves the saying of theology from any possible Gnostic drift (cf. S. Bulgakov, The Light without Dusk, Lipa, Rome, 2002, pp. 116-202).
[9] Francesco Sartori, op. cit., p. 61.
[10] Ibid, pp. 96-98, vv. 34 ff.
[11] Francesco Sartori, Mistica Danza, Gondolin, Verona, 2017, pp. 34-35.
[12] St. Gregory Palamas, archbishop of Thessalonica, devotes a dialogue entitled «Theophanes» to the incommunicable and communicable divinity question. [He] states, «The divine nature must be said to be both impartable and, in a certain sense, participable; we come to the participation of God’s nature, and yet it remains inaccessible to us» (P.G. 150). God thus remains inaccessible to us as essence. It is, therefore, necessary to confess … a distinction according to which He would be inaccessible and accessible simultaneously under different relations. It is the distinction between God’s essence or nature proper, inaccessible, unknowable, incommunicable, and the divine energies or operations, natural forces and inseparable from essence in which God proceeds outwardly, manifests Himself, communicates Himself, gives Himself. “Divine and deifying illumination and grace is not the essence but the energy of God” (Theophanes) (cf. Vladimir LOSSKY, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. The Vision of God, Edizioni Dehoniane, Bologna 2013).
[13] Francesco Sartori, The Mutations of Love, Laura Capone Editore, Rome, 2018.
[14] “Love that forgives none beloved love” on Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canticle V, verse 103, quoted in ibid, p. 52.
[15] Emanuele and Francesco Sartori, Mystical dance, Gondolin, Verona-USA Press, 2017.
[16] Transliteration: koiné: common language. Popular Greek language that spread from Alexandrian times and was later established in the territories of the Roman Empire and beyond. The de facto koiné had become the international parlance; somewhat like today’s international English, quite different from that used at Buckingham Palace.
[17] Transliteration: human love of desire and possession (read éros), which always implies a form of return (precisely possession, albeit Platonic) and divine oblative gratuitous love (read: agàpe).
[18] Transliteration: love and death.
[19] Transliteration: Nèmesis. Cosmic-divine vendettas, personified in the deity of the same name, to bring man back into his natural and preordained state, inducing him even by force of events to abandon any form of ὕβρις (ìbris laws) (pride, pride, will to power, for the titanic purpose of disrupting the order inscribed by Fate in each being).
[20] Friedrich Nietzche, Beyond Good and Evil, Adelphi, Milan, 1977.
[21] “The Love that moves the sun and the other stars” on Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, Paradise, canticle XXXIII, verse 145.
[22] Francesco Sartori, op. cit. pp. 58-59.
[23] Francesco Sartori, Luce da Luce, Fede&Cultura, Verona, 2020.
[24] Particularly in the introduction to the book “Le Mutazioni dell’Amore” (Laura Capone Editor, Rome, 2018) and to the penultimate work entitled «Mistica danza,» which came out in 2017, for the editors of Fede&Cultura in Verona, written in collaboration with his son Emanuele. In these two texts, I developed, according to classical Greek canons, the fundamental relationships between érōs (human love), Agápē (divine Love), Thanatos (purifying and liberating Death), and Nemesis (divine cosmic-spiritual vengeance), evoked by ubris (the self-deifying pride of modern and contemporary technocratic man).
[25] Ibid, pp. 16-17.
[26] Francesco Sartori, op. cit., p. 64. This hymn in metrical novenaria is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and is intended as a chant prayer to introduce vespers in the liturgy of the hours.
[27] Ibid, p. 21-22.
[28] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Laterza, 2011, XXVI reprint, 2024.
[29] Cf. Susanna Tamaro, Go where your heart takes you, Baldini & Castoldi, Milan, 1994.
[30] Cf. Albert Camus, op. cit.
[31] «rare swimmers in the vast whirlpool» lat. cit. from Publius Virgilius Maron, emistichio of the Aeneid (I, 118), referring to the castaways of one of Aeneas’s ships destroyed by the storm unleashed by the goddess Juno.
[32] Cf. René Girard, The Scapegoat, Adelphi, Milan, 1989; id., I See Satan Fall Like Thunderbolts, Adelphi, Milan, 2001.
[33] This purpose was mapped out from the early and youthful book I Saw God, Generazione Nuova, Rome, 1971.
