The Question of Charity

Cloisters at L'Abbaye Fontevraud

Notes from Aug 17/18, Part 5 

 In our exploration of the connections between Hadewijch,  Swedenborg, and Gurdjieff, it’s worthwhile considering virtue as objectivity. Charity, on the other hand, may be construed as conscience; and the two qualities taken together, virtue and charity, form an equivalency to Gurdjieff’s conscious labor and intentional suffering. We cannot consider the virtue of conscious labor without considering objectivity, which is an effort to see things selflessly; and we cannot consider charity without considering intentional suffering.

 These two faculties serve as the inward and outward breath of the development of the soul: the inward breath, an impersonal effort to be objective, to take in the world around us without the personal inflections that contaminate our understanding. This is the food that we feed on.

On the other hand, intentional suffering is the outward breath of the soul: the results of our labors, in which we offer ourselves to others and the world in an equally selfless way. This is charity; and I think you will readily see how we cannot be charitable if the food that we take in is not taken in objectively in the first place. We cannot form a right outward intention of charity if the inward intention from which it is formed does not form correctly. Hence Gurdjieff’s conscious egoism; an “I”,  a personhood, which is formed objectively through virtue and unselfishness not through self interest and the pursuit of base pleasures. Only this “I” which is so formed can be charitable – intentionally (consciously) suffer on behalf of others, offering the results of their inner and outer labors objectively and supporting the collective enterprise of other people and humanity.

This particular proposition is so essential to the human condition it hardly bears mentioning; it is the premise both of humanism and metaphysical humanism. It is also, by the way, essential to the premise of Walt Whitman’s poetry, and all the questions that Kerouac and other more secular writers of a so-called “progressive” (humanitarian) mindset raise about our activities. If we wanted to cast it in the terms of Gurdjieff’s enneagram, we would characterize the left-hand side of the diagram as being about people (real beings) and the right hand side as being about things. This has always been the essential dilemma of mankind: what takes precedent, the things or the people? The so-called “revolutions” Kerouac  brings up in his diary were all about, in one way or another, things; even a church or a political institution can be a thing in this regard. Each one proposed to satisfy human desire (unspeakable desire) by changing the material circumstances in which people live; whereas Metaphysical Humanism begins with the premise that we must change the inward lives of the people, and not their outer circumstances. Even the touchingly naïve lyrics of the Woodstock generation — “we have got to get ourselves back to the garden” — somehow ring more true, capture a greater essence of the human soul, than the ring of the cash register. That generation, of course, has failed just as spectacularly as every generation before it, and fallen prey to every speakable desire that can be imagined. Yet the longing persists, even without a path to guide it.

 To be charitable means to surrender something, to offer something. The word has its original roots in Latin carus,  that which is dear, costly, or loved: and of course it means to offer what is loved to another. To offer what is valuable to another. We’ve already established the idea that one thing that’s valuable in the marketplace of spiritual exchange is objectivity —  and another is, of course, love itself. Yet it is impossible for us to offer love itself, or any attendant objectivity, if we only love ourselves and not others. Hence we discovered that the very premise of “love” itself is tainted from the beginning by selfishness; and perhaps this gives us some insight into why Gurdjieff renamed his essay on “pure and impure emotions” to The Meaning of Life.

 In order to be charitable, to have acts rooted in charity, we must first understand what this word means. It means, in a nutshell, love: yet it also means, in Gurdjieff’s terms, intentional suffering. The connection between love and suffering leads us at once — and inevitably — to the premise that Christ died for our sins, a supremely loving action of absolute intentional suffering. Here we see the manner in which Gurdjieff’s teaching is so firmly and irrevocably embedded in Christian ethos, Christian pathos, Christian mythology, and Christian metaphysics. These are the same roots that Hadewijch speaks of — all of them are grown down into God.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.