This is the second in a series of essays on Louis Claude de Saint-Martin’s book, “Natural Table of the Relationships which exist between God, Man and the Universe”. The series begins here.

A world of chaos

In this chapter, Saint-Martin takes on the subject of the disorder, evil, and chaos that we observe in the world around us. Although the world we see is clearly full of marvels — Saint-Martin takes his example of this from astronomy — it is also undoubtedly filled with disorder. He goes as far as to say that the material world has no influence whatsoever on the powers that created it. It is therefore of a lesser rank than Divinity, and “doesn’t share at all in the Divine essence.”

What is the cause of this disorder?

Saint-Martin takes some time to build up to the answer to this question, using a few paragraphs to constrain the possible answers.

Firstly he points out that it would not be possible for this “Inferior Cause” to exist together, even outside of Time, with the Divine. Losing any possible communication with God, the source of disharmony fell automatically into “its own corruption”. Saint-Martin points out that this is identical to how we fall away every day when we fall prey to the attractions of materiality, even against our best intentions.

Here Saint-Martin changes the grammatical number he is using, and begins to refer to the Inferior Cause as plural. Fallen far from God, these agents then go on to create duality:

…, they made specific what should essentially be universal; split up actions which should be united; confined into one place what … should circulate endlessly throughout the entire system of Beings; and finally manifested in physical form what had previously existed in immaterial principle.

“Natural Table”, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin

A chain of consequences

In other words, it was not God who created the material world, but rather it was the Fallen Spirits acting within their own corruption. This is a distinct move away from the cosmology that Saint-Martin inherited from Pasqually. In that myth, the material world was created by God to imprison and instruct the Fallen Spirits, but here something different is happening. In the story presented here, God is entirely passive.

The Spirits fall away due to their crime — they are not cast away. They do not then immediately arrive in a material world created for them, but rather they create this world themselves by their rebellion against unity.

The Fallen Spirits on the other hand, are very active, and play a role in this myth much closer to a combination of the Christian Devil and the Gnostic Demiurge. Creators of a fallen world, attacking all sentience within that world to further increase the disorder it craves.

God does not act. Everything is a natural consequence of the actions of the Fallen Spirits.

Material and spiritual beings

From here, Saint-Martin discusses key differences between material and spiritual beings.

1. While both types of being may be corrupted, only bodies (composed of inhomogeneous parts) can be destroyed by that corruption.
2. Corrupted spirits are no longer subject to the Law (“Logos”) of which they are constituted, whereas corrupted bodies no longer appear in their proper form. This incorrect form can even go so far as to be death.
3. Material beings are corrupted by outside forces. Spiritual beings can only be corrupted by themselves, from within.

This last point is of significance for where Saint-Martin is taking his argument. In his philosophy there are three distinct orders of being:

1. God
2. Intelligent beings
3. Matter

Since matter cannot corrupt itself, then this third, lowest order of being cannot be the source of disorder we observe in the world. It is impossible for God to be that source, since it is God’s very being that is the Law (the Logos) — it is a logical impossibility for a perfect Law to act against itself.

So it must be intelligent beings — including humanity — that is the source of disorder and evil.

This is absolutely key. It is us that creates disorder; every time we act against the Divine Logos, every time we act to divide instead of to unify, even if entirely unconsciously.

And in doing so, it is us — in our enormous multiplicity — who create this fallen world of materiality.

This conclusion is deeply shocking, but it sits at the heart of Saint-Martin’s thinking and it lies behind the idea of “reintegration” that he inherited from his former master Pasqually. Something that we will come to later.

Coda

To finish, Saint-Martin adds a short paragraph on how to understand Evil. Or rather, on the impossibility of understanding it.

To understand something is to try to learn its truth. But Goodness and Truth are one and the same, so Evil is logically inconsistent with truth, and so cannot be understood.

Note that Saint-Martin is not denying the existence of Evil. In the very next paragraph he goes on to emphasise its reality. What he is stressing here is that Evil in its ultimate chaos and confusion is not something to be understood. Rather it is something to move away from in our journey towards reintegration.

Although this chapter is quite negative in tone, focusing as it does on disorder and Evil, there is always a tinge of hope. Yes, we are amongst those Fallen Spirits responsible for the infinite distance between God and the material universe, but we also have the power to hear the voice of Logos and to act accordingly.

We are the connection, the lifeline, between the material world and the Divine realms

Before the Flambeaux.