The Word as the Beginning of the Way

Let me begin with a simple question. What is the most powerful tool a man possesses?

Intelligence, some will say; the will, say others; or the capacity to create, to reason, to raise civilizations. None of those answers is wrong. But there is a tool prior to all of them, without which intelligence cannot express itself, the will cannot make itself felt, and knowledge cannot be handed on.

That tool is the word.

Before building a city, man had to imagine it; before imagining it, he had to name it. For whatever has no name remains, for us, in a kind of darkness. Naming is the first act by which man begins to order the chaos, and perhaps for that reason, from the oldest traditions of humanity onward, the word has always held a sacred place.

In the beginning was the Word. Not a sound, nor a combination of letters: a creative principle, a force capable of transforming an invisible idea into a visible reality.

Words are not only instruments for communicating with others: they are also what we communicate with ourselves by. We think in words. We remember in words. We interpret reality in words. And when words lose their meaning, something deeper begins to decay.

For a society does not lose its institutions first. A society loses its concepts first. Before a civilization enters a political, economic, or moral crisis, it usually enters a crisis of language: the words go on existing, but they stop meaning the same thing. Men speak of liberty, but no longer does everyone understand liberty the same way. Men speak of truth, and fewer and fewer believe an objective truth exists. Men speak of spirituality, and often confuse it with passing emotional states. Men speak of knowledge, and confuse information with wisdom. When words stop corresponding to things and become mere instruments of convenience, thought is left working with false tools.

This book is born of that observation, and of another inseparable from it.

Among the ways man has had of approaching the mysteries of his existence, one is Freemasonry. Heir to traditions that sought not only to illuminate the individual but to raise a whole community through him, it has been turning, gradually but steadily, into something else: more corporate, more bureaucratic, more attentive to procedure and jurisprudence than to the depth of its own teachings. Esoterism was no ornament in it: it was the very means of transmitting, by ways that speak at once to the intellect and to the intuition, what discourse cannot reach. Today, in many lodges, that means has been set aside in favor of a literal reading, and the rituals and the symbols remain in use with their meaning intact, waiting for someone to go looking for it underneath again.

Now, what the Tradition tells us is that these two crises, the crisis of language and the crisis of initiation, are not two different crises.

They are the same one.

An initiatic tradition is transmitted by symbols, and language is the humblest form of the symbol. When a man loses the capacity to tell one word from another, an idea from its appearance, what he believes from what he knows, no symbol will be able to work inside him. He will be able to see it, describe it, even become learned in its history. But he will not be able to make it work. An initiation that does not come to work in a man does not thereby cease to be valid (this matters a great deal, and we shall return to it): it lies dormant. Where the chain was not broken (and that will be discussed slowly), the deposit is whole; what is missing is someone to open it.

Here appears the central question of everything that follows: Why can a regularly initiated man spend an entire lifetime in front of the symbols without receiving a single one?

Not for want of merit, nor of will, nor even of intelligence. And not because the rite has failed either: we shall see that it does not fail, and that this is at once the best and the most demanding of news. The Tradition always knew the answer, and said it in images we have spent centuries repeating without hearing. Before he can rise, a man must be transformed. Before he seeks the light, he must prepare the lamp. Before he contemplates the temple, he must work the stone.

Very few works, however, take up that question. Almost everything written on Freemasonry today fits on two shelves. On the first is scholarship: histories of the Order, constitutions, minutes, disputes over dates; serious work, which I use and am grateful for, done by men who know more and more about the Tradition and expect to receive nothing from it. On the second is popularization: virtues, values, self-improvement; works that promise to make the reader better, which is the one thing an initiatic way does not promise. Between the two shelves there is a gap: the work that takes Freemasonry seriously as what it is, a way of transmission, and asks why it almost never transmits anymore.

This book aims at that gap.

That is why we shall travel a road that may look indirect and is not.

The first part takes up the diagnosis, and it does not do so in a single manner. It begins by establishing what Freemasonry is and what it is not, because without that there is nothing to miss. It goes on to the two deformations that hollow it out from within: morality put in the place of the work, and the ego fed by what was meant to dissolve it. It stops afterward at what a man finds when he begins to labor in a lodge, which is the part of this book that cost me the most to write. It goes on asking where what seems to have been lost ended up, because things do not evaporate. And it ends when, in the place that had been left empty, an imitation installed itself that is confused with the thing itself to this day.

The second part goes back to the three disciplines that for centuries were held to be the foundation of the whole formation of a free man: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, gathered under the name of the Trivium. Today we see them as school subjects; for the ancients they were something else. Grammar taught a man to name correctly; Logic, to think correctly; Rhetoric, to transmit without betraying what he had understood. The Tradition never took them for a schoolroom matter: it knew that without them there is no transmission possible, and for that reason it placed them inside the temple itself; the second part will show where.

Perhaps, without saying so, the ancients were speaking of something more than three subjects. A man whose words do not correspond to things cannot think with exactness, because he thinks in words. And a man who does not think with exactness cannot receive what is delivered only in the form of a symbol, because he will translate it at once into the first thing he knows how to handle. The three arts are not ordered by importance. They are ordered because each is the condition of the next.

Let us say from the outset what they serve for here, because it is not what is usually supposed. They are not a program of personal improvement. Language is the humblest form of the symbol, and these three arts repair the organ by which a symbol is received. They do not make a man better: they make him capable.

The third part crosses the border the first two leave in plain sight: the one that separates the psyche from the spirit. It asks who it is that uses the tools; it draws the map the tradition made of that question (a center, a radius, a circumference); and it states what makes the passage real: the way, the master, the rite, and the death by which one enters. The fourth part enters the temple at last: it reads the whole of it with the instrument now earned, and shows that Athens and Jerusalem have been working together in that room for three centuries. It answers the questions waiting in the porch and leaves a method for the lodge, arriving at the one temple still missing, the one each man is. And an epilogue takes the question out of the temple and onto the road: four roads to the same question (two of them from outside the temple), and a debt to the greatest of them, settled at last.

It remains to say where this book came from, because it did not come from a library. For years, a handful of Masons from different lodges and different countries sustained a common work that met in no temple. It met where it could: on the screen of a telephone, at odd hours, between jobs, families, and obligations. We had no temple in common, but we had something harder to sustain: a discipline in common. There we read slowly, argued over every word, went through a bereavement as well, and tempered the common grammar these pages employ. A good part of what the reader will find here was worked out there first, in the quick idiom of a conversation without the rigor a tiled meeting imposes (that is what we call our ritual assemblies), but with the respect and the responsibility that serious conversations between Brothers carry, met as Masons meet: on the level. I set it down out of gratitude and for something more: because it is the proof, small and sufficient, that the work whose absence from the lodges the first part of this book laments is still possible wherever there are half a dozen willing men. And that when it happens, no one needs to ask whether that was Freemasonry. We are not legion:¹ we never have been, and we never shall need to be. The name of the multitude already has an owner. And quantity, as will be seen throughout this work, was never the measure of what matters here.

Several men will accompany us along the road. René Guénon, with his critique of the loss of the metaphysical dimension in modern man. Carl Gustav Jung, a witness to the psychic and not a doctrine, so that we may look squarely at what works in us without our permission; the third part will draw his border for him. Raimon Arola, who has followed the trail of the sacred to the place where it had to take refuge when the world stopped thinking by analogy. Henry Corbin, who fixed as no one else did what a symbol is and what it is not. Pico della Mirandola, humanist of the first hour, for whom the dignity of man consisted in what man was to receive. Louis Cattiaux, painter and poet, proof that a work can still be inside something. Ananda Coomaraswamy, who taught that the traditional doctrines have no psychology: they have a science of the spirit. Titus Burckhardt, who gave alchemy back its meaning. And Honorio Gimeno, Master Mason, who transmits doctrine as it ought to be taught: with geometry. On the road back, outside the temple now, two profane voices are waiting as well: Niccolò Machiavelli, who taught us to look at man as he is, and Carlos Alberto Montaner, to remind us that outward liberty always rests upon an inward condition. They will not be the only ones, and the count does not matter: none of them comes to lend authority, they come to lend eyes.

And one more, who does not come behind the others: Fermín Vale Amesti.² I owe him a good part of what I am, and something that does not fit on a list of authors. When I cite him, the reader will know that I am not citing a reading.

There is, besides, a voice the reader will meet several times without a name: that of a master I had, formed in the same chain from which the best of this book descends, and through whose hands what came by that way was passed to me. To him belong some of the best images that follow and several of its most uncomfortable questions. I do not name him, and it is neither carelessness nor ingratitude: the third memory with which this book opens is his, and there are debts better paid in silence.

And above all of them, the Tradition itself, which is the one thing none of them invented. For perhaps the most important question is not "how much do we know?" but "what have we become by virtue of what we know?" Perhaps it is there that the difference between knowledge and wisdom begins.

This is a journey of return: a re-encounter with primordial Freemasonry, the Royal Art; not as a form belonging to the past, but as a permanent reality that waits for anyone willing to undertake the return toward himself.

To begin it we must go back to the first step: to the ancient art of understanding that a word is not merely a word.

A word is a key.

Depending on how we use it, it can open a door onto the truth or build a prison around our own ignorance.