Good and Evil in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Part VII: Coda

 

Part VII of a seven-part series

 In the complex universe of Lentrohamsanin and Ashiata Shiemash, one must come under and acknowledge an authority. It’s a question of which authority. In this argument, and most especially in the parable of Lentrohamsanin, we see that it is the authority of established tradition, heritage, the old ideas, that have the much greater value. No reader familiar with the man will be surprised to find this embedded in Gurdjieff’s exposition.

That tradition and heritage are an intimate part of our inner world, an indelible awareness to be likened to Carl Jung’s collective unconscious. In Gurdjieff’s parables, this collective unconscious contains mankind’s most precious possession: conscience. Not just the instinctive knowing of the difference between good and evil, but a capacity for remorse in regard to our action in said context. 

In Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, this priceless inner world is under continued assault by the demands and allure of the outer.

The tension in any examination of Gurdjieff’s concepts on good and evil ultimately rest on the difference between the objective and subjective. In broad brush strokes, one concludes that Gurdjieff did believe in an objective evil that lies outside men themselves, located in the metaphysical realm of virtue. 

This selfsame virtue—“the good”—is a quality that Antisthenes and other Cynics saw as objective; it far outweighed the opinions and actions of ordinary men. Hence their contempt for them. Beelzebub’s Tales is an explicit work of cynicism in the best and deepest sense of the tradition. 

Socratic and cynical insight lose the essence of their perspective the instant that subjective personal opinions contaminate them; and of course, his early essay The Meaning of Life Gurdjieff (which probably dates to the early 1920s, well before Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson was completed) presents this as the essential difference between what is pure and what is impure. 

His central preoccupation with this theme of impurity through “the admixture of subjective properties” (see The Holy Planet Purgatory) is thus long-standing and a recurrent theme throughout his works. The concept not only links his work to the idea of metaphysical or external values which trump any subjective perspectives we may have on life; it intimately links it with Swedenborg’s concepts of selfishness and unselfishness and their role in the development of the human soul and its place in heaven or hell. 

It is, by the way, quite impossible that Gurdjieff would have reached the level he did in the review of metaphysical philosophies without reading Swedenborg. The man’s books were, by the time Gurdjieff lived, translated into dozens of European languages and one of the preeminent metaphysical influences on 19th century spiritual thinking. Just as there are correspondences between Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, Meetings with Remarkable Men, and traditional 19th century adventure-story forms by Jules Verne and other authors (as I pointed out in my book Novel, Myth, and Cosmos), so does Gurdjieff’s cosmology glitter with various reflections of Swedenborg’s angelic hierarchies and the struggle between the objective and subjective denizens of heaven and hell. To pretend, then, that Gurdjieff’s ideas and writings arose in some kind of literary and cultural vacuum is to propose an absurdity.

In any event, the question on the table is not the heritage of Gurdjieff’s work, interesting though that may be. The question ultimately becomes one of whether or not the man was a moral relativist; and I think that the evidence demonstrates that this can’t possibly be the case. Gurdjieff rather aspired his followers — and, judging from the scale of Beelzebub’s Tales, all mankind —to the morality of the cynics, which is a very high morality indeed: at the same time both distinctly metaphysical and at powerful odds with the average moralities of the average man. 

To argue that we can excise good and evil from this picture is a nonstarter. It isn’t a question of whether or not good and evil exist, but what their nature is — and this is the exact inquiry that Gurdjieff would have us undertake, not through outside influences and what other people tell us (that is, filtered through the maleficent after-effects of the organ kundabuffer) but by means of our own ability to use critical reason and to discriminate. 

These faculties, in Gurdjieff’s teaching, must not be the superficial implants imparted by education and imitation, but rather organic qualities that derive from Meister Eckhart’s inflow of God’s good into the most intimate regions of the soul — a process that cannot take place when it’s mixed with the subjective nature of our perception. May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.