The sacredness of temenos and the suspension of time alone give that order of meaning to the initiates and their living outside the temple itself, directing and decontextualizing them into something super-temporal and not linked to the contingent. Meditations around sacred spatiality: on the divine as center and circumference, the analogy between temple and heart, the symbolism of the sacred mountain and the omega point, the act of building and ordering as an imitatio of.
di Simone Salandra
cover and images: leon battista alberti, ideal city, Around 1450
The pregnant image of the symbolic aspect of spatiality is that of the Sistine Chapel, where the fingers of God the Father touch those of man and bring back to the Greek etymology of symbol, Namely sum-dance, gather, that is, the bridge between the two worlds, the earthly and the super-mundane, that is, the invisible, which we know well to be more real and tangible than what appears.Β
La sacred spatiality so it is one apophatic spatiality: in fact in the temple, the sacred space par excellence, we take it to put it with Nicola Cusanus "In an incomprehensible way, the maximum of which there can be nothing greater, as this is infinite truth". This apophatic spatiality is grasped if an ontological leap is made and only in the sacred space of a basilica, a loggia, a mosque and in their suspension of ordinary time and in 'introduction to another time, manages to be cultured. The space is lived there sub species interioritatis, in an intuitive way as the divine can be grasped, with which the space of the loggia itself is permeated, almost a sort of space of the heart. It is no coincidence that the Templars, before their knightly initiations, used to tell the aspiring knights that God is yes in the mind, but above all in the the heart, coincidentally, the only organ not subject to cancer, who decides when to stop beating.Β
The sacred space or the space of the heart it is therefore a place in which the common man cannot have any citizenship, since with the common and rational human capacities it cannot be penetrated. To define the Temenos to which the sacred space introduces us, I would use one of the most fascinating definitions of God given by the mystics, that is Deus est sphaera infinity cuius centrum est ubique, circumferentia nusquam and god replacing Temenos, to fully render the concept of sacred spatiality where the hierophany manifests itself in its infinite creative power, of which everything is impregnated, in the center which is everywhere and in every initiate, which contains it as a heart. The way to get closer to the reality of the divine, if it can be stated in this way, is to progressively deny first the material characteristics that can be attributed to it and then the intelligible properties. Being able to penetrate a circumference that is nowhere would seem completely impossible, unless you access it thanks to a non-rational disposition and mystically use a sort of curvature of the space itself. As happens for example in the fictional essay by Rene Daumal, whose protagonist Pierre sogol β Logos on the contrary - try to reach the Mount Analogous, an inaccessible and divine place for ordinary means, which possesses an extraordinary force of attraction, symbolizing a spatiality unthinkable in the modern world, that of sacred mountain, alive and present in all its ancient power in the depths of the human soul.Β
Il ontological leap between finite and infinite, fundamental for knowing and entering the sacred space, it allows us symbolically to imagine the sacred mountain as the result of the spiral-shaped rotation of the radius of an imaginary circumference around the hypothetical axis generated by its central point. If then this axis were thought of as axis beat, one can imagine how the cone thus obtained is none other than the sacred mountain itself, at the same time also the circumference, which would represent the meeting point between divine and human place: theaxis beat is none other than the bridge between heaven and earth. Ultimately, reaching the sacred mountain is equivalent to connecting the inner and outer space, the earthly and the divine, the visible and the invisible that occupy the immense spaces of the human soul, divine spaces unknown to the man who does not know. himself, first of all the heart space which, in addition to being the symbol of the divine, is the organ that allows man to live. This spiral and tangent space where the finite merges with the infinite it also takes us to the labyrinth, as a sacred and at the same time ambiguous space where the one whom God wants to strike can lose life and sense, as the ancient Latin adage says Quos Deus vult lose, dementat prius.
The ontological leap, therefore, is also a mental leap, as it is equivalent to penetrate into a dimension of totality where a different logic, another language and other behavioral rules apply with respect to our world, to our logic, to our ordinary behaviors. The man who wants to participate in sacred spatiality must therefore re-enter this dimension of totality, obtaining what for the ancient Gnostics was true knowledge, the gnosis precisely, and that for modern analytical psychologists it is the identification process, whose goal is the space of the divine or, in other words, that transpersonal and infinitely unfinished space of the Self. In human form, this possibility has been symbolized by the archetypal image of Christ who, as an icon of the Self, can be thought and expressed as the psychic totality of man, but above all as the Omega in which everything converges, as he claimed Teilhard de Chardin.
In this process, man will have to experience the spatial curvature which will bring him into that particular, circumscribed and infinite space that coincides, in all symbolic traditions, with the XNUMX. Paradiso, where it is possible to communicate with the divine world. Only in this way can he find a home in Heavenly Jerusalem described in the Apocalypse, also a circumscribed space where a difficult entry corresponds to a no less complicated exit. Obviously the path of curvature is the symbolic path that qualifies as esoteric in its ritual and liturgical form: it remains secret and reserved because not everyone is able to follow it, not having that particular disposition of mind to start that path without which every true sacred and therefore, non-human space, is precluded. True knowledge, in fact, is not an acquired right or even the result of a democratic choice, but it is elitist and does not put itself to the vote. Certainly many men try and have always tried to go beyond the curvature of space and climb the sacred mountain, some have succeeded like the great mystics, others in their own way like the great quantum physicists, but they make no history. The more instead or, as we would say in ancient Greek, or the polloi, they have only tried to find a way to enter it or to bring them closer to this unattainable goal.
It follows that the sacred space forms, consequently, one with the order of the world, making the world have a meaning and above all can be governed. Building is, in fact, an ordering, a governing, and whoever builds performs a sort of superior, royal and divine function. The need to respond to the anxieties and fears of the finite is converted precisely thanks to the construction, in an elevated order, of a government out of time. In fact, whoever governs, who orders, guides and founds the city has always had a divine role, man god or demigod that he was, and in all the symbolic traditions in the image of the builder this exemplary role is recognized. This happens because it is the order that gives meaning to living, directing it and contextualizing it in something not linked to the contingent. However, every act of building is always one imitatio Dei and, conversely, a proof of the existence of the divine objectified in a construction. In fact, every construction symbolically reproduces the world, that is, the cosmos created by God, so in the sacred space man approaches with a reverential attitude as that space contains the ultimate meaning of being, the answer to the problems that torment the human being. man and the lost word to search for.
And the sacred space refers to Cosmos, that is torational and harmonious aspect that pervades all creation and it is expressed in the divine will, which has always existed and worked, but which must continually be realized again in human space and time. Each sacred space, therefore, ultimately manifests an order. And this order reveals the human desire to merge with the divine and the hope that has always been inherent in the human soul to obey the divine in order to escape the bitter consequences of the relentless law of becoming. The sacred space is therefore also a way to exorcise, in the construction of a lasting structure, the terror of the transient and of death., with that looming nothing that crushes the human soul, but it is a space that the divine itself also needs, because it too risks disappearing on the surface, swallowed up by the past and by time. From here arises a profound tension to find and penetrate a sacred spatiality, in perfect imitation of the divine one, through which it is possible reconstitute the image of the Pleroma and overcome the curvature to access the mysterium and fascinans of the sacred.
Sacred space that becomes a non-space, a non-place likeAleph Borgesiano, full of all possible places or, returning to a more appropriate image, to the plain of truth di Plato, a place where there are all the ideas and forms that were, have been and will be, and also those that never will be, because the divine contains them all in power. The sacredness of the Temenos and the suspension of time alone gives that order of meaning to the initiates and their living outside the temple itself, directing and decontextualizing them in something super-temporal and not tied to the contingent. And this sort of katechon that they carry inside accompanies them in profane space and time and is the very dynamic proof of the divine. In conclusion, a powerful sacral value derives from this in fieriΒ which makes the initiate see, especially within the sacred place, that intuition of meaning that leaves those who contemplate it astonished and those who conform to it satisfied.
