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In this chapter we will compare the Far-Eastern Great Triad with yet another ternary which, although it has its roots in the Western traditional ideas that were current in the Middle Ages, was also to exert its influence in the exoteric and purely ‘philosophical’ domain.

This ternary is expressed in the formula Deus, Homo, Natura: God, Man, Nature. Speaking quite generally, these three terms obviously stand for the three basic objects associated with the different kinds of knowledge which Hindu tradition describes as ‘non-supreme’—in other words, every kind of knowledge that falls short of pure and transcendent metaphysical knowledge. The middle term in the ternary—Man—is clearly the same as the middle term in the Great Triad. But it remains to be seen in what sense and to what extent the two remaining terms—God and Nature—are equivalent to Heaven and Earth.

The first thing which needs saying is that ‘God’ in this context cannot be the Principle itself, which is beyond every distinction and cannot possibly be correlated with anything whatsoever. The very way in which the ternary is presented implies a correlation—even a complementary relationship—between God and Nature. We are therefore dealing with a perspective that, relative to the Cosmos, is immanent rather than transcendent. God and Nature are as it were the two poles of the Cosmos, and even if they are beyond manifestation as such, they can only be considered as distinct within the context of manifestation.

In terms of those kinds of knowledge that used once to be grouped under the heading of ‘philosophy’ (understanding this word in its original sense) God was only the object of what was then called ‘rational theology’, which was sharply distinguished from ‘revealed theology’. Strictly speaking ‘revealed theology’ is also only concerned with the ‘non-supreme’; however it does represent a certain knowledge of the Principle in the exoteric—or more specifically religious—sphere. In other words it stands for knowledge of the Principle to the extent that such knowledge is possible after due allowance has been made for the intrinsic limitations of the exoteric domain, and for the special forms of expression that have to be used for adapting the truth to that particular point of view.

‘Rational’ means whatever relates exclusively to the exercise of individual human faculties. It will be clear that whatever is ‘rational’ is altogether incapable of reaching the Principle itself; even under the most favorable conditions^[1] the most that it will be capable of will be of grasping the truth of its relationship to the Cosmos.^[2] From this it is easy to see that (providing allowance is made for inevitable differences in perspective) the Principle for it will be precisely what the Far-Eastern tradition calls Heaven: for according to that tradition, if we try to reach the Principle from a position in the manifested universe we can only do so through the intermediary of Heaven.^[3] In the words of Chuang Tzu, ‘Heaven is the instrument of the Principle’.^[4] As for Nature, it is tempting simply to understand it in its primary sense of primordial, undifferentiated Nature: the root of all things, _Mulaprakriti_ in the Hindu tradition. Then, of course, it will be exactly equivalent to Earth in the Far-Eastern tradition. But a complication arises here, because when someone speaks of Nature as an object of knowledge, he usually means something broader and less specific. According to this more usual sense, the knowledge of nature includes the study of everything that could be classified under the heading of ‘manifested nature’—in other words everything that goes to make up the totality of our cosmic environment.^[5] This extension in meaning could up to a certain point be justified by stating that in this case nature is being viewed in its ‘substantial’ rather than its ‘essential’ aspect. According to this interpretation all things would be viewed—just as in the Hindu _Sankhya_ system—as simple productions of _Prakriti_, independent so to speak of any influence of _Purusha_.^[6] It could perhaps be said that this way of looking at things is at the root of the perspective obtaining in ‘physics’ or ‘natural philosophy’.^[7] However, there is another, more satisfactory and more complete way of accounting for this extension in meaning of the word Nature. This is due to the fact that, where man is concerned, the totality of the cosmic environment is regarded as forming his outer world. It is therefore, so to speak, purely a question of a change of perspective. At the level corresponding to the strictly human point of view, everything which is external can, at least in a relative sense, be described as ‘terrestrial’, while everything internal can be described as ‘celestial’. It is worth recalling here our earlier comments on Sulphur, Mercury and Salt. Whatever is ‘divine’ is necessarily ‘internal’;^[8] in the case of man it acts upon him like a ‘sulphurous’ principle.^[9] Whatever is ‘natural’ is what goes to make up a man’s environment or surroundings; and this means (as we explained earlier) that it plays the role of a ‘mercurial’ principle. Man, the simultaneous product of the ‘divine’ and of ‘nature’, finds himself situated, like Salt, at the common boundary between the internal and the external, which is also the point where celestial and terrestrial influences converge and reach a state of equilibrium.^[10]

We can now make some general statements about the interrelationship between God and Nature—provided, that is, that we bear in mind our initial remarks on the limited sense in which the term ‘God’ must here be understood; otherwise we are likely to fall into the error either of pantheism on the one hand or, on the other, of ‘association’ in the sense of the Arabic word shirk. On this basis it can be said that God and Nature, when viewed as correlatives or complementaries,^[11] assume the respective roles of active principle and passive principle of manifestation, or of ‘act’ and ‘potency’ in the Aristotelian meaning of these terms: pure act and pure potency in relation to universal manifestation as a whole,^[12] and relative act and relative potency when viewed in a more specific and restricted context. In short, they will always correspond to ‘essence’ and ‘substance’ as we have so often defined them.

Another way of indicating these active and passive roles is by the use of the expressions _Natura naturans_ and _Natura naturata_.^[13] Here the word _Natura_ denotes not just the passive principle but, simultaneously and symmetrically, both of the two principles associated directly with ‘becoming’.^[14] Here again we meet up with the Far-Eastern tradition, which says that everything in existence is modified by _yang_ and _yin_ or Heaven and Earth. To quote Lieh Tzu, in the world of manifestation ‘everything is governed by the revolution of the two principles of _yin_ and _yang’_ [i.e. the reciprocal actions and reactions of the celestial and terrestrial influences].

In the fuller account of Chuang Tzu:

Once the two modalities of being (_yin_-_yang_) had become differentiated within primordial Being (T’ai Chi), their revolution began and the Cosmos was modified accordingly. The peak of _yin_ (condensed into Earth) is passivity and tranquillity; the peak of _yang_ (condensed into Heaven) is activity and fertility. Earth offers itself passively to Heaven, Heaven exerts its influence on Earth, and from the two all things come to birth. The binomial Heaven-Earth is an invisible force; its action-and-reaction produces every modification. Starting and stopping, fullness and emptiness,^[15] astronomical revolutions [time cycles], phases of the Sun [the seasons] and Moon: all these are brought about by that single cause that nobody perceives but which functions perpetually. Life moves towards a goal; death is the return to a final point. Births and dissolutions [i.e. condensations and dissipations] follow upon each other without a break, without anyone knowing their origin, without anyone perceiving their end [because both origin and end are concealed in the Principle]. The action and reaction of Heaven and Earth are the one and only motive power behind this movement^[16]—a movement that guides all beings through an indefinite series of modifications to the final transformation which returns them to the one Principle from which they originally issued.^[17] At the start of modern philosophy, Bacon still considered the three terms God, Man and Nature as representing three distinct objects of knowledge, and so divided ‘philosophy’ into three major sections corresponding to these terms. But already, in agreement with the ‘experimental’ tendency of modern thought of which at that time he was the representative—just as Descartes was the supreme representative of the ‘rationalistic’ trend^[1]—it was to ‘natural philosophy’ or the knowledge of nature that he attached the greatest significance. But by and large it was still only a question of ‘proportion’.^[2]

It was left for the nineteenth century to produce a distortion of this particular ternary that was both extraordinary and unexpected. We are referring here to the so-called ‘law of the three states’ as propounded by Auguste Comte. But as the connection between this law and the ternary in question may not be immediately apparent, a few words of explanation will not be out of place—especially as we have here a strange and instructive example of the way in which the modern mind is capable of distorting a traditional datum beyond all recognition once it decides to take it over rather than simply reject it out of hand.

Comte’s fundamental error in this case was to suppose that, regardless of the specific kinds of speculation to which man has applied himself, he has always had only one aim in mind: the explanation of natural phenomena. Starting from this narrow point of view he is inevitably led to assume that every possible kind of knowledge is simply a more or less imperfect attempt to arrive at an explanation of the phenomena of nature. Combining this preconceived idea with a totally fantastic notion of history, he thought he was able to discover three different types of explanation which he considered succeeded each other in historical order—although in fact all three explanations relate to specific kinds of knowledge that have always coexisted. His mistake was to apply each of them to one and the same object, because by doing so he naturally found them incompatible with each other.

Comte linked his three ‘explanations’ with three distinct stages that, according to him, humanity passed through during the course of the centuries: the first one he called the ‘theological state’, the second the ‘metaphysical state’ and the third the ‘positive state’. During the first stage the occurrence of phenomena is ascribed to the intervention of supernatural agencies. During the second these phenomena are associated with natural forces which are no longer transcendent in relation to things but inherent in them. Finally, the third stage is marked by abandonment of the search for ‘causes’ and the beginning of the search for ‘laws’—in other words for consistent and constant relationships between phenomena. This final ‘state’—regarded by Comte as the only definitely valid one—sums up pretty accurately the limited and purely relative standpoint of the modern sciences. But as for his description of the two other ‘states’, it is such a hopeless mass of confusion that we will not undertake the pointless task of analysing it in detail. Instead, we will simply extract the specific points that relate directly to the question in hand.

Comte’s thesis is that each stage followed the same line of development: the various component elements of each type of explanation in turn gradually became co-ordinated and culminated in the final conception of one single principle containing all the different elements. So, in the ‘theological state’, the various supernatural agencies were first of all conceived of as independent of each other, then they became grouped in a hierarchical structure, and finally they were all synthesised in the idea of God.^[3] Similarly, in the so-called ‘metaphysical state’, the notions of different natural forces were viewed by him as tending increasingly to merge into the one ‘entity’ called ‘Nature’.^[4] We see here Comte’s total ignorance of what metaphysics actually is. ‘Nature’ and natural forces obviously have to do with ‘physics’, not ‘metaphysics’: he could easily have avoided such a blatant error by simply referring to the etymology of the words he used. But be that as it may, what we have here so far is God and Nature, understood however not as two objects of knowledge, but only as two concepts which the first two of the three kinds of explanation posited according to the theory^[5] happen to lead up to. This leaves us with Man; and although it is perhaps slightly more difficult to see how this term in the triad plays the same role in relation to Comte’s third ‘explanation’, this is in fact the case as we will now see.

This is the case because of the particular way in which Comte understands the various sciences. According to him they have successively attained to the ‘positive state’ in a definite sequence; each more recent one has been prepared for by those that preceded it and without which it could not have come into being. Now the final science of all according to this sequence—the science which all the preceding ones were only leading up to, and which accordingly is the goal and crown of so-called ‘positive’ knowledge—is the one he christened with the barbaric name ‘sociology’ (a word that since then has passed into common usage). This ‘sociology’, which Comte saw it as his ‘mission’ to establish, is in fact the science of Man. Alternatively it can be called the science of Humanity—understood of course only from a ‘social’ point of view. Indeed, for Comte no other science of man is possible: in his eyes everything that is unique in a human being when compared with other living beings is attributable entirely to his social life. In spite of what certain people have said, it was therefore completely logical that he ended up where he did. Pushed on by the more or less conscious need to discover a kind of parallelism between the ‘positive state’ and his two other ‘states’, he saw its culmination and final achievement in what he called the ‘religion of Humanity’.^[6]

So it is that we find God, Nature and Humanity presented as the ‘ideal’ goals of each of these three ‘states’. What we have said should be enough to demonstrate that the all too famous ‘law of the three states’ derives simply from a false application and distortion of the ancient ternary Deus, Homo, Natura, God, Man, Nature. What is even more extraordinary than this fact in itself is that apparently nobody has ever perceived it.

Footnotes

[1]These conditions are fulfilled by an authentic traditional exotericism as opposed to the purely secular conceptions of modern philosophy.

[2]Needless to say, this will be a relationship of subordination of the Cosmos to the Principle, not a relationship of correlation. This point needs emphasising so as to avoid even the slightest possibility of any appearance of contradicting what we have just said.

[3]Hence the fact, which we have already mentioned, that from the perspective of manifestation the Principle appears as the ‘pinnacle of Heaven’ (T’ien Chi). It is interesting to note that when Christian missionaries wanted to translate the word ‘God’ into Chinese they always used either the word T’ien or the expression Chang Ti, ‘the Ruler on high’, which is just another way of describing Heaven. This would seem to indicate that for them the ‘theological’ perspective itself (using this word in its proper and fullest sense) did not really reach as far as the Principle, although of course they would probably not have been aware of the fact. Doubtless this was a major error on their part; but whether this is so or not, they demonstrated the limitations of their own mentality and their inability to distinguish between the different meanings that the word ‘God’ can have in Western languages in the absence of more precise terms such as we encounter in the Eastern traditions. As to Chang Ti, the following quotation from the commentary on the Chou Li may be found helpful: ‘Heaven and Sovereign: both are one. The word Heaven is used to describe what it is; the word Sovereign to describe how it rules. Because it is so immense, it is called Splendid Heaven. Because it rules from its position on high, it is called Sublime Sovereign’.

[4]Chuang Tzu, chapter 11.

[5]The use in Western languages of the one word ‘nature’ in both of these senses is unavoidable, but unfortunately only too prone to give rise to confusion. In Arabic, primordial Nature is _al’Fitrah_, whereas manifested nature is _at-tabiʿah_.

[6]In fact, of course, nothing whatever can be effectively produced independently of _Purusha_, for the simple and obvious reason that another factor besides pure potentiality is needed if something is to pass from the state of potentiality to the state of actuality.

[7]The word ‘physics’ is here meant to be taken in its original and etymological sense of ‘science of nature’ in general. The English expression ‘natural philosophy’ originally had this same meaning, but in recent times (at least up to the time of Newton) has been used to denote ‘physics’ in the limited and specialised sense usually attributed to the word today.

[8]Compare the Gospels’ Regnum Dei intra vos est, ‘The Kingdom of God is within you’.

[9]Here again we encounter the two meanings (‘sulphur’ and ‘divine’) of the Greek word theion.

[10]Needless to say, this way of looking at things (which is strictly Hermetic) goes far beyond exoteric philosophy. On the other hand, exoteric philosophy needs to be justified by something else beyond it precisely because it is only exoteric.

[11]This way of understanding the terms ‘God’ and ‘Nature’ accounts for the symmetrical fashion in which they are inscribed on the symbols belonging to the 14th degree of Scottish Freemasonry.

[12]We see from this that the well-known definition of God as ‘pure act’ really refers not to Being itself (as some people believe) but simply to the active role of manifestation. In Far-Eastern terminology we could say it refers to T’ien, not T’ai Chi.

[13]Historians of philosophy generally attribute these terms to Spinoza. In fact this is wrong, because although he certainly used the terms himself (not without adapting them to fit his own personal ideas), their history extends back much further in time and they were in no way his own invention. When the word _Natura_ is used on its own without further specification, it is almost always a question of _Natura naturata_, although very occasionally the term can also be understood as referring simultaneously to _Natura naturans_ as well. In the first case _Natura_ corresponds to the use of the term in the ternary that we have been considering; in this second case, however, it strictly speaking has no correlative because there is nothing else apart from it besides the Principle on the one hand, and manifestation on the other.

[14]The essential idea of the Latin word _natura_, just as of its Greek equivalent _physis_, is of ‘becoming’. Manifested nature is ‘what comes into existence’; the principles involved are ‘what brings into existence’.

[15]The chief allusion here is to ‘emptiness of form’—i.e. the supra-formal state.

[16]Chuang Tzu, chapter 21.

[17]This is the ‘departure from the Cosmos’ that we referred to earlier in connection with the top of the pole protruding above the chariot canopy.

[1]Descartes of course also devoted himself primarily to ‘physics’. However, his intention was to establish it on the basis of deductive reasoning, using mathematics as a model; Bacon, on the other hand, wished to found it on an entirely experimental basis.

[2]Leaving aside, that is, the fact that the sciences were already conceived of in an entirely exoteric sense. But that is another question, and our concern here is simply with what it is that is recognised as an object of knowledge independently of the question of the particular perspective from which it is being viewed.

[3]These three subordinate phases are described by Comte as fetishism, polytheism and monotheism. It should hardly need stating that monotheism (i.e. the affirmation of a single Principle) must in fact be the original stage, not the last one. [^]: Actually Comte’s ‘monotheism’ is the only one of his phases that has existed always and everywhere, exception being made for the lack of understanding of the masses and for those cases of extreme degeneracy in certain traditional forms.

[4]Comte is assuming here that wherever the expression ‘Nature’ is used it is to some degree being personified—as indeed it commonly was in the philosophical and literary rhetoric of the eighteenth century.

[5]It is perfectly clear that it is just a hypothesis and nothing more. Also, as a hypothesis it has virtually no foundation whatever, in spite of Comte’s dogmatic assertion to the contrary by wrongly giving it the name of ‘law’.

[6]‘Humanity’—conceived of as the collectivity of all men who ever have lived, do live or will live in the future—is for him very much of a personification, because in the pseudo-religious section of his work he calls it the ‘Great Being’. To all intents and purposes this is a kind of profane caricature of ‘Universal Man’.

19 | God, Man, Nature

Footnotes