Faith, Hope and Love
Silence is the indispensable climate for all revelation; noise renders it absolutely impossible.
The religious life, as everyone knows, is not exempt from decadence — when it ceases to be founded in mysticism, illumined by gnosis, and actuated by sacred magic. It grows cold without the fire of mysticism, it clouds over without the light of gnosis and becomes impotent without the power of sacred magic. There remains then only theological legalism supported by moral legalism — hence the origin of the religion of the scribes and Pharisees at the time of the New Testament. This is the twilight which precedes its night, its death.
FAITH is the experience of divine breath; HOPE is the experience of divine light; and LOVE is the experience of divine fire. There is no authentic and sincere religious life without faith, hope and love; but there is no faith, hope and love without mystical experience or, what is the same thing, without grace. No intellectual argument can awaken faith; what it can do, at best, is to eliminate obstacles, misunderstandings and prejudices, and thus help to establish the state of interior silence necessary for the experience of the divine breath. But faith itself is the divine breath whose origin is found neither in logical reasoning, nor in aesthetic impression, nor in human moral action.
The divine and flaming Word shines in the world of the silence of the soul and moves it. This movement is living faith — therefore real and authentic — and its light is hope or illumination, whilst all springs from the divine fire which is love
or union with God. The three “ways” or stages of traditional mysticism — purification, illumination and union — are those of the experience of divine breath or faith, divine light or hope, and divine fire or love. These three fundamental experiences of the revelation of the Divine constitute the triangle of life — for no spirit, no soul and equally no body would be able to live if entirely deprived of all love, all hope and all faith. They would then be deprived of all vital elan (vigorous spirit or enthusiasm, the general impulse behind evolution), of what else could this be but some form of love, hope and faith operating at the basis of all life? It is because “in the beginning was the Word” and “all things were made through Him” (John i. 1,3), and it is because the primordial Word still vibrates in all that lives, that the world still lives and has the vital elan which is nothing other than love, hope and faith inspired from the beginning by the creative Word.…
Love, hope and faith are at one and the same time the essence of mysticism, gnosis and sacred magic. FAITH is the source of magic power and all the miracles spoken of in the Gospels are attributable to it. The revelation — all the revelations of gnosis have only one aim: to give, to maintain and to increase HOPE. … For all revelation which does not give hope is useless and superfluous. Mysticism is fire without reflection; it is union with the divine in LOVE. It is the primary source of all life, including religious, artistic and intellectual life. Without it, everything becomes pure and simple technique. Religion becomes a body of techniques of which the scribes and Pharisees are the engineers; it becomes legalistic. Art becomes a body of techniques, be they traditional or innovative — a field of imitation or experiences. Lastly, science becomes a body of techniques of power over Nature.
But [we are called] to the way of regeneration, instead of that of degeneration. [We are invited] to de-mechanise all that which has become solely intellectual, aesthetic and moral technique. One has to de-mechanise in order to become a mage. For sacred magic is through and through life — that life which is revealed in the Mystery of Blood. May our problems become so many cries of the blood (of the heart), may our words be borne by blood, and may our actions be as effusions of blood! This is how one becomes a mage. One becomes a mage by becoming essential — as essential as the blood is.
Meditations on the Tarot, pg 71