Virtue and Charity

Cloisters at L'Abbaye Fontevraud

Notes from Aug 17/18, Part 3

 Metaphysical Humanism embraces the idea of an intelligence that senses: an intelligence that is able to experience, grasp, and comprehend the world simultaneously, at the same time, in just as complete a way as intellect does. 

This ability is an innate property of the human organism: it’s installed in the nature of Being itself through a metaphysical intelligence that—for obvious reasons—has no words of its own to explain it. It explains itself through its own property of organic sensation.

 Feeling is equally 1/3 of my innate intelligence; yet the only intelligence I tend to rely on is my intellect, with my sensation and feeling functions left as paupers who go begging from one moment of my life to another to pick up what’s left for them.

Going back to this fundamental humanity that Jack Kerouac described—that same fundamental and divine humanity that Hadewijch discusses—is where the root of our Being begins. She reminds us:

 Love is not in each person according to what he feels, but according as he is grounded in virtue and rooted in charity. (Ibid, Letter 10.)

 Love, in other words, begins in a place in us that is grounded and rooted. 

Hadewijch uses the word grounded in order to indicate the idea that love is in us according to how grounded we are in sensation, which is objective. Anyone who has had the experience of the center of gravity grounded in sensation will already understand the relationship between this experience and the objective nature of goodness, or virtue. 

 For Gurdjieff, that which is objective is that which is superior. That is to say, objective consciousness and objective being mentation are superlatives: they are excellent, virtuous, and represent the good. This is because they have been purged of everything personal. This is what excellence meant to Gurdjieff, and the manner in which he explained the difference between pure and impure emotion in his early essay The Meaning of Life.

Hadewijch expounds at length on objectivity in other passages, in which she anticipates Meister Eckhart’s spiritual virtue of Gleichgültigkeit—the equal value of all things:

Do good under all circumstances, but with no care for any profit, or any blessedness, or any damnation, or any salvation, or any martyrdom; but all you do or omit should be for the honor of Love. If you behave like this, you will soon rise up again. And let people take you for a fool; there is much truth in that.

—Ibid, Letter 2: Serve Nobly, page 49

Hence we understand that virtue, with both Hadewijch and Eckhart, is objective; and we see that Hadewijch is asserting that real love, spiritual love, is grounded in objectivity.

Lest there be any doubt about this, take note of the fact that she follows this by saying love arises in an individual according to how much they are rooted in charity. 

This reference of being rooted in charity refers to the deep growth of spiritual roots within being that emerge through a lasting relationship with sensation. Combined, the action of sensation in the roots that it grows create an inward experience of the objective goodness of life which has a great deal to do with the spiritual experience that Hadewijch attempts to describe to us. It is directly related to Gurdjieff’s practical work on this matter of sensation.

 She reminds us that love is not in each of us according to what we feel simply because we cannot rely on the emotions to tell us where our center of gravity lies. That’s the job of sensation. She reminds us of this in other letters, for example, Letter Four, The Rule of Reason, where she says the following:

In seeking spiritual sweetness, people err greatly; for there is very much emotional attraction in it, whether toward God or toward men.

And this:

In hope many people err by hoping God has forgiven them all their sins. But if in truth their sins were fully forgiven, they would love God and perform works of love. Hope leads them to count on things that never eventuate, for they are too lazy and do not pay their debt either to love or to God, to whom they owe pains to the death.

 Let it be noted here that all of Letter Four concerns various subjective inadequacies of the intellect in comprehending the nature of Being. It’s thus well worth reading in its entirety. The point that I’m trying to make here is that Hadewijch well understood the subjective nature of the intellect, as well as the subjective nature of emotion, which she calls feelings here.

I don’t think that we can, in the end, in any way separate the idea of an intelligence of sensation from what it means to be fundamentally human; nor can we separate it from what it means to truly love, since true love is objective and has as its aim only love itself, which is ruled by conscience, instinct, and awareness, not selfishness and greed. Almost everything we consider to be “love” in our ordinary life is moved by one of those two latter passions; and the only way that we can move away from that is to “grow a new organ,” as Gurdjieff’s protagonist Beelzebub said, which is our sensation of Being.

  It’s so important to understand that this faculty of sensation is an intelligence. We mistake intelligence as something limited to words and the intellect; and in this we err greatly, because we never discover the intelligence of sensation in its active nature. Make no mistake about it, it has one; and every animal’s intelligence of sensation is an embedded and irrevocable part of its active nature. Only man has lost the capacity to be directly invested in this faculty as a default; he has lost the ability to manifest this way. In this sense, it is the exact birthright that Esau sold Jacob. As the hairy (externally oriented) child, he was unable to sense inwardly in the same way as the smooth skinned Jacob.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.