Intentional Suffering

Capital from  Eglise Notre-Dame, Cunault

The image shows asian influences. 

This isn't in the least unheard of in medieval art. The stone craftsman guilds were well educated and had long- established worldwide connections.

  Notes from Aug 17/18, part 9

Notably, Gurdjieff brought the concept of intentional suffering to spiritual work, explaining it as the original (and lost) teaching of the Buddha. Yet this idea, as well, has direct sources in the middle ages, as we discover in Hadewijch’s Letter # 2: Serve Nobly:

…if a man knew God's will—that misery is dear to him—he would gladly be, by his will, in the depths of hell; but he could never make progress or grow in a place where he could taste no pains… It is much better for you, if you wish to walk the way of Love, that you seek difficulty and that you suffer for the honor of Love, rather than wish to feel love. (P. 50)

 Readers familiar with Catherine of Siena will find references to intentional suffering in her writings, as well. 

 This idea of engaging in spiritual development through inner trial provoked by outer sufferings is not just a consistent trope of esoteric spiritualism; it's part of the classic myth of the hero, deeply embedded not just in Gurdjieff’s metaphysics but metaphysics in general, according to my examination of the enneagram interpreted through the Arabic system of the Names of God, or forces, that drive the universe. 

The manner in which Gurdjieff reinvented a new mythology for modern man is further examined in Novel, Myth, and Cosmos. The question remains as to why the man reinvented all of these rather ancient ideas in his ambitious Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. I believe the point is that he wanted us to encounter these ideas in an unrecognized form, so that they could better penetrate into our subconscious. In Gurdjieff’s assessment of man’s psychological barriers to inner development, he determined that our habit of encountering the familiar and instantly assuming we understand it was a profound obstacle to absorbing traditional teachings about inner growth.  On this note, we re-examine part of an earlier quote from the book:

“This strange trait of their general psyche, namely, of being satisfied with just what Smith or Brown says, without trying to know more, became rooted in them already long ago, and now they no longer strive at all to know anything cognizable by their own active deliberations alone… 

—Beelzebub’s Tales, First Edition, p 104.

 This one fragment of a sentence alone goes a very long way indeed towards explaining the reason we have the book in the first place.

We gain further clues to the way how our reflexive intellectual interpretations damage our ability to understand life in any direct way in Hadewijch’s  Letter Four, The Role of Reason, which could easily serve as a template for Gurdjieff’s ruminations on this subject. In particular, her comments on how human reliance on hope and charity are damaged by reason are strikingly reminiscent of Gurdjieff’s  myth about Ashiata Shiemash’s teachings, inscribed on a marble tablet that still survives:

Faith of consciousness is freedom

Faith of feeling is weakness

Faith of body is stupidity.

Love of consciousness evokes the same in response

Love of feeling evokes the opposite

Love of body depends only on type and polarity.

Hope of consciousness is strength

Hope of feeling is slavery

Hope of body is disease.

  While this does not exactly mirror Hadewijch’s comments in Letter Four, the piece – or a remnant oral tradition of it – could well have served as a template for Gurdjieff’s adages. Its emphasis on the great weakness of our material side and its fallibility has direct parallels to Hadewijch; and despite their brevity, her propositions of mankind’s naïveté in regard to these failings also bears comparison to Beelzebub’s Tales in its entirety.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.