Introduction
By
Robert Sardello
In contrast to every form of art criticism and art history, this writing teaches us how to enter into the living activity of painting, painting not as something that we look at, displayed before us, but rather as living spiritual activity that is before and within us at one and the same time.. Even more, this remarkable book you are holding provides a new and astounding way of spiritual practice – meditation with paintings. This new form of meditative practice is developed in the most careful way imaginable. You will find this book an invaluable guide in learning how to develop picture-attentiveness, a form of perceiving that focuses awareness with the whole while also noticing particular details. It is not an analytic form of consciousness; it is something more than mental; it is a high form of intuition.
The form of the book is somewhat unusual. It consists of a very detailed text, but somewhat of an outline format. When we received the text for publication and heard of the story and work of Kurt Falk from his wife Anne Stockton, we strongly felt that the text should not be severely edited. Kurt Falk had left this writing where it is at his death. No one would really be capable of taking up the writing; the mark of Kurt Falk’s inner spirit pervades the work completely. In addition, the text reads so clearly as it is, and in this form it can be most easily utilized as a practice manual for meditating with the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, as Kurt Falk intended.
Bosch’s paintings become a whole new way of questioning – of questing --not in order to find an answer or solve a problem, but rather as a way of developing the inner capacity of letting things speak for themselves. That is, working with this book develops the spiritual quest of listening. Listening is fundamental to any spiritual practice, but it is even more so to the spiritual path depicted in so many different ways by Hieronymus Bosch.
We are given a very specific inventory of spiritual practices in this writing. The paintings of Hieronymus Bosch are not to be approached as if we were spectators at a gallery, or would-be intellectuals in an art history class, but rather as supplicants entering a holy place, crossing into the space of contemplation. That is, it is the paintings themselves that are the meditative “device”, rather than any interpretation of the paintings. The commentary provided by the author are meditations and are best worked with in that manner. The descriptions of each painting help us to stay with the images, and to let them enter into our soul-being.
Working with painting as a spiritual practice requires something very different than other forms of spiritual practices. This work takes place in the realm of feeling. That is, it is necessary to enter into the feeling of the paintings, not what the paintings make us feel. Feeling is an objective realm, perceivable through the region of the heart. All art embodies feeling, but few authors, critics, or historians know how to speak of it, and fewer realize that feeling can be a path of spiritual initiatory practice. As you read this work, try to read it from the stance of feeling. Place your attention in the region of your heart when you look at the pictures of the paintings. Kurt Falk speaks the language of feeling and has found a way to convey this in a cognitively understandable manner. But, it is beneficial to take what is spoken in this book into the realm of the heart rather than take the book only as a new and interesting approach to understanding the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. It is that, of course, and you are completely free to stay at that level with the work, where a great deal can be learned. However, there is much, much more available in what Kurt Falk has given. This “much more” is nothing less than an initiatory path of the feeling life.
From the very first words of this book, it is apparent that Bosch’s paintings are instruments of contemplation. Not any contemplation, but the contemplation of Christ. Bosch’s paintings are all religious, but they have nothing to do with religion; in fact, many of them are direct criticisms of the corruption of religion that was rampant during his time., and in spite of the fact that many of them were commissioned by churches, the priests never realized that the painting they received were a protest against the degraded state of the church. The Christ that Bosch was concerned with is the imagination of what every human being can become, as well as all that has to be gone through on the way toward becoming a spiritual human being. His concern is the future human being.
This is the sense of Christ that we take into contemplation through the paintings of Bosch. Contemplation here is not as we usually imagine it – an experience of solemnity, but rather contemplation that takes place in such a way that our very bodily constitution alters over time. It is possible, with the help of this book, to go through a body-soul-purifying process.
The word “pure” is certainly fraught with dangers, and I don’t mean it in the sense of ‘untarnished’ or some religious notion of that sort. I mean ‘purification’ in the way that Dante understood purification. The word itself refers to the desire regions of the soul.
Dante’s Divine Comedy exemplifies the path of purification of desire. And I think that Bosch’s paintings are in this same genre. In Dante’s imagination, all desire is good. Desire is like a big net thrown out by God to draw us back to the Divine. The trouble is, we take one desire as the whole of desire at any given time. Dante gives a wonderful picture of desire as a diamond through which a ray of light shines. Desire is the whole of the diamond and all of the rays. We go wrong when we take one facet and one ray as the whole of desire. Bosch’s paintings are very much within this kind of imagination of the purification of desire as being present, with intensity, to the fullness of every moment of experience, whatever that might be. He shows us the folly of singularly focused desire; and he shows the fullness of the desire for the Divine.
The outline of all the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings in the first part of this book is an extraordinarily important contemplative listing. Take it as a spiritual listing, a guide to contemplative practice. If you want to work on purification of the desires, go to one of the paintings concerned with that domain and work with it.; if you want to work on the development of the sense of the spiritual “I”, go to another painting. And, if you want to enter into spiritual development with care rather than trying this and that out, moving from one thing to another, then work with these paintings, which also show the folly of following those who do not know what they are doing. Or, begin to develop the awareness of how much of what seems oriented toward helping our spiritual growth may be removing from us the very possibilities of growth. In fact, working with the paintings can help us come awake to the fact that deception is rampant in the “spiritual growth industry”. Unless we take our inner awakening into our own hands, we may find ourselves tying one thing after another without any developed critical capacity. The central image for inner spiritual development out of our own forces is the Treeman image visible in several of Bosch’s paintings and the central image in the Cairo painting that inspired this writing.
It is completely unnecessary to have all the paintings in front of us as we read this spiritual inventory of spiritual practices, and of those things that can interfere with clear consciousness but which look as if they are providing spiritual service. We may want to look at the paintings, but it is actually good to hold the word descriptions of the paintings given here for a long while. When you do go find the paintings, you will discover that you see them completely differently than if you had gone to the images first. The words are not dictating how we see but are rather a preparation for true seeing.
The paintings of Bosch also teach us how to see spiritual events on their own terms rather than terms that have been sanctioned by the church and often obscure the more esoteric dimensions of religious practices. There are, of course, many more forms of spirituality than found within religion, but Bosch even goes beyond any of those. The true secret of Bosch’s art is that he depicts the future-development of the human capacity to produce spiritual experiences out of one’s own inner soul forces. By ‘one’s own inner forces’ I am not referring to ordinary ego consciousness, but rather a completely conscious spiritual individuality.
The soul of the author is obviously deeply engaged with the artistic work, and thus our soul also resonates with this engagement and we begin to notice details while never losing a sense of the whole of each painting, and indeed of the complete oeuvre of Bosch. It is not even necessary to have the paintings alongside the descriptions of the paintings, we are still affected by feeling a sense of the unfolding of particularity within wholeness. The words of the text emerge out of the meditative silence of the author rather than appearing as “already present” words, that secondary kind of writing that speaks “about” something rather than from within it. And we see the paintings through feeling, not through intellect. That is, one gives oneself over to the images, enters into them, lets them wash over completely, such that one becomes the image itself. It is apparent that Falk has followed this procedure himself, that this writing is a product of direct experience rather than remaining at the level of intellectual curiosity.
We also have the hint in the spiritual inventory of Bosch’s paintings that one can work contemplatively with the paintings in a specific series in order to allow spiritual capacities to unfold in a kind of order. It seems important not to place too much emphasis here because, in spiritual work in these times, there may not be an prescribed order. Nonetheless, it can be helpful to consider the paintings in the sequence spoken of by Kurt Falk.
There is a kind, a type, a prototype of spiritual “progression” that is hinted at by virtue of the description of Bosch’s paintings occurring in the order that they do. This progression should not be understood as processional, as linear, as if one had to proceed inwardly in development from what is felt from the first painting all the way through what is felt in the last. The sense of progression conveys that everything that one has to go through and develop interiorly does not all occur at once to the point of conclusion. On the other hand, when one is working inwardly with one felt sense expressed in a painting, then everything else, that is, the whole world of feeling is also affected. We perhaps find it difficult to understand this mentally, but the heart does not have this same trouble. The heart, that great center of the feeling life, lives in contradictions, paradoxes, and multiple simultaneous happenings. This kind of sensibility is needed in working with paintings as an instrument of spiritual development.
It is extremely important not to take this spiritual inventory of the paintings of Bosch as sectarian. That is, the scope of the spiritual initiatory practices here do not belong exclusively within, say, the tradition of the Catholic religion. The initiatory practices depicted here are the New Mysteries. They have to do with the future of humanity, not a specific religion. They have to do with the process of entering into the spiritual “I”, a call made to all human beings. Even more, the diversions and illusion of the individual process of spiritual development are shown over and over; notice, in particular the forces of ossified thinking, perverted feeling, and will that is taken over by other forces than the purified soul; these are chief among the mis-directions we have to face and overcome.
There are two ways of reading this book. It is a work that, on the one hand seems intended for those who are engaged in some form of spiritual practice, and in particular to those who are in one way or another involved in what might best be termed ‘esoteric Christianity.” That term alone covers an awful lot these days, so it might be better to specify it even further by saying that the book intends to be helpful for those on the path of a Rosicrusian-Anthroposophical work. For such individuals, this work offers a remarkably new and exciting way to have a sense of where they are in their inner life. Kurt Falk has done nothing less than discover that the paintings of Bosch are a mirror of the soul on this spiritual path. Thus, those who are engaged in this spiritual work will immediately have a sense of recognition of the descriptions of the paintings.
At the same time, however, there is another way of reading this book. It can be a true awakening to a desire to engage one’s one soul and spirit life in a disciplined way. That is, it also addresses the seeker who may not even know that he or she is indeed seeking something different from art than the usual art history and art commentary. The writing recognizes that people have always looked to art for spiritual guidance in the feeling realm, and only modern art criticism and art history have steered us away from this noble purpose. For such people, however, it might be more necessary to simply read through the whole book, perhaps at first wondering a bit what is going on with this approach to art. Once having gone through the book, however, it will begin to do its work and gradually one’s whole inner life begins to be different, and one begins to be more aware that the feeling life is a mode of spiritual presence. It is that mode where all is interior, without a sense of there being any ‘without’ at all. That is, Kurt Falk works with these paintings in such a manner that we are turned “outside in”, and the feeling realm is awakened.
A characteristic of esoteric Christianity as a path of spiritual initiation is that there is an emphasis on the development of individuality. For many people who are engaged in spiritual practices, individuality smacks of ego and the purpose of spiritual practice is to rid the illusion of individuality; certainly of that mark of individuality known as ego-consciousness. With the paintings of Bosch, it is as if each individual is called by his and her own peculiar path. Spiritual path thus means each individual has to find their own way by developing capacities of witnessing the interior landscape. As with Dante, so too with Bosch, the path upward is the path inward.
On this path, we are each the Prodigal Son, depicted in, for example, Bosch’s painting titled “The Haywain.” We stray and stumble, learning our imperfections, not with some goal of becoming perfect, but with the aim of facing them, getting to know them, stop projecting them onto others.
Bosch’s paintings reveal that we are like the solitary figure of the “Haywain”, traveling through the world of desire, learning, gradually, that desire is not to hold onto, but is the indication that we are being desired by God.
Within such a view, which cannot be understood intellectually, but is given as a sensuous feeling, evil takes on very different possibilities than as something to be avoided or gotten rid of. The demons in Bosch’s paintings exist right alongside the other spirit-beings. Trying to avoid evil inevitably results in projecting evil outward as always belonging to someone else or some ‘group’. The path of desire carries with it a felt-sense that it is through the individual confrontation of evil within each of us that we develop true capacities of spiritual freedom.
Confronting the sense of evil as ‘within’ does not, however, make it something only personal. Whatever occurs within is decidedly ‘real’, and not merely something made up, a fantasy realm. And it is something far deeper and stronger than what psychology terms the Shadow. The true mystery of evil, however, is that it can only be confronted within and that it has to be faced without being opposed. The result of doing so, we are told in the description of the painting titled “The Temptation of St. Anthony” is that it is only through the ‘demons’ that we can find the spiritual worlds. Not by opposing them or avoiding them, and certainly not by reacting in fear to their presence.
Often, the spiritual work of Bosch’s paintings has to do with the colors more than the content of what is painted. Falk mentions this when working with the Temptation of St. Anthony painting:
As far as the content is concerned, this triptych is second only to the Hortus Deliciarum in Hieronymus Bosch’s known works. The two grisaille paintings on the reverse side of the panels are sparsely dramatic and the gray-greens stand in strong contrast to the world of color breaking out from inside the altar-piece. These colors are not for show, not used for their own sake, but their hues and qualities are meant to move and grip us.
There is an absolute unity of form and color that makes the observer more than a mere observer. The colors of the painting release forces in him that lead him out of and beyond his habitual mundane world. Looking becomes contemplation that inspires our imaginative capabilities. Thus a purely aesthetic activity turns into a moral-spiritual affair because the realm of the conscience is affected.
This is quite an amazing statement! Through the colors we enter into a unity with the paintings and there is no longer a separation between looker and painting. The reason painting can be a very powerful medium of transformation lies in the way that color works. We are affected not emotionally, but feeling-ly -- and the realm of desire then becomes an ethical-moral affair. That is, we are able to palpably feel where we are in our soul life, to feel where we are off the mark, and also become able to feel when we are on the mark. This inner direction all happens through color.
Yet another characteristic of the path of individual soul and spirit development shown through the paintings and the astute commentary by our author is that the way of feeling, the way of color, is the way through the “thickness” of the world. There is never an attempt to develop a spirituality that is separate from the things of the world. There is no absolute division set up between the earthly and the spiritual. They are two sides, two aspects of the same reality. To work spiritually in the realm of feeling is to completely accept being an earth-being who is working to become, not a spiritual being, but a spiritual human being, which is something quite different than a human being who does spiritual things. The former is an advance in spiritual evolution, while the latter is where most of us are by nature and a modicum of good will. The object of this path of spiritual practice is not to have experiences of the spiritual worlds, to obtain enlightenment, to leave the earth, but rather to serve the earth as fully bodied, spirit-beings.
The way of feeling cannot work with absolute distinctions. The mind works that way. But feeling is all of the same fabric, so learning discernment in the realm of feeling is something very different than learning to make cognitive judgments in the realm of clear ideas. In our feeling life, we are more often confused than not. Here is where we most easily fool ourselves. It is incredible the way that Kurt Falk reads the paintings, helping us development discernment in the realm of feeling. Notice how a painting depicts real and truthful feeling standing right next to illusion in the realm of feeling. Notice also how Bosch has made available to our feeling-awareness the difference between true feeling and the double of feeling; we see this difference vividly depicted in the ways in which institutional, dead religion, contrasts with the sense of the living Church, which is not an institution, but rather a prototypal coming into being that constantly unfolds, metamorphoses, as the life of the “I”; “I” as in “Not I but Christ in me.”
These introductory remarks barely touch on the first few of the twenty-nine paintings commented on by Kurt Falk. Indeed, this first part of the book can be a new meditation manual, a manual for initiation into the spiritual worlds through the life of feeling.
The second part of this writing casts yet another lens over the whole of the work of Bosch, bringing initiatory practice to an even higher level.
The inspiration for this book is the mysterious painting titled “The Last Judgment”, which Kurt Falk found in a museum in Cairo. You will read of this discovery at the beginning of the second part of this book. I only want to address the question of the authenticity of this painting? Is it a real Hironymous Bosch painting? It does not matter. If you were trying to buy the painting or put in on exhibition, it would certainly matter. But, for the purposes of this writing, it has been a revelation for Kurt Falk and the key to all of the works of Bosch. If it is not authentic, it was certainly painted by someone who thoroughly understood Bosch, and may in fact have wanted to provide a key to Bosch. The key image in the painting is the figure of the Treeman, the witness, the act of individual spiritual attention, the spiritual I-being, spirit-individuality, the inner presence of the individuated self.
The fact that Kurt Falk works with this one painting in the context of the whole of the work of Bosch, authenticates the painting as revelatory of the spiritual dimensions of the work of Hieronymus Bosch. This one painting fits within the whole context and makes clear what Bosch was doing. That is its primary importance, which may be something different and more significant than whether or not the painting is authentic. Falk, does, however, make a compelling case for the authenticity of the Cairo painting.
A different form of awareness is required to begin to perceive the significance of Bosch’s paintings, and the nature of this awareness forms an important dimension of this second part of the book. It is, for example, necessary to be able to focus attention on the particularity of each painting while at the same time be within a diffuse form of awareness. This kind of awareness can be part of the spiritual practice of working with the paintings and consists of looking at a picture of a Bosch painting, focusing on some particular element for a few moments and then shifting awareness to being a diffuse awareness of the whole of the painting all at once. Shift these two modes of attention back and forth while looking at one of the paintings. Then, after a few minutes, stop the shifting and be present to the painting and notice your experience. Not only your sensing/perceptual experience, but also, at the same time, what is felt inwardly. The sense of the paintings will begin to open up in decidedly new ways. You will gradually have an inner sense of the paintings, though it may be an experience beyond words. With this form of perceptual practice the articulations provided by Kurt Falk take on much more importance, for you will find these descriptions speak what you might not be able to say. He has worked to find just the right descriptive language, which is something akin to language that understands the qualities of dreams.
The dream-qualities of the paintings of Bosch are, however, something quite different than night-dreams. Bosch was not painting the imaginal landscapes of the so-called unconscious. Rather, he was painting the multiple spiritual worlds that are always here, all around and within us. Thus, Bosch’s paintings, in some respects, mirror the surrounding landscape. It is as if the familiar world is ‘layered’ with realm after realm of spiritual worlds. Bosch was not making up pictures of these worlds but rather pictures his ‘seeing’. He accurately pictures clairvoyant experience, but you have to be able to “see through” the content to the awareness out of which a content suitable to the awareness emerges.
It is crucial to understand that it is the qualities of the content of the paintings rather than the literal forms of the figures within the paintings that express the spiritual worlds. The genius of Bosch lies in his amazing capacity to create a content that vividly expresses the qualities and activities of spirit beings. Further, it is important to realize that the spiritual worlds are highly complex. All spiritual traditions and practices understand that the spiritual worlds are every bit as complex, indeed far more so, than the earthly world. The spiritual worlds are intermixed with beneficent and detrimental beings, with the dead who are helpful and those who are harmful, with levels that are helpful and levels that are not so helpful. Bosch beautifully pictures the wholeness and complexity of the spiritual realms, but it is how our attention is brought to their depiction by Kurt Falk that makes it possible to see much more of what is present in the paintings. The phenomenological description of the Cairo painting is nothing short of fantastic.
I also want to draw your attention to what may perhaps be the deepest aspect of the mysterious painting of Hieronymus Bosch and that no one besides Kurt Falk seems to be aware of except in the most superficial manner. Bosch’s paintings are from the future! They come from the real, tangible, stream of time from the future. Thus, the paintings are not really about the time of Bosch. They are not really about the decadence of the church, not at the deepest level of the paintings anyway. They are about what is coming-to-be. However, they are not predictive of the future. The future time stream is not predictive; it is not about what is going to happen “the day after tomorrow”. The esotericist and originator of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner introduced this notion of the time stream from the future. It is not a theory, but something quite possible to experience, though not with the mind. It is the sense of everything of the world, of the cosmos, and of the spiritual worlds, and most of all, of the human being, as in process of coming-to-be, and this coming-to-be is an ‘aura’ of everything that is. The coming-to-be of the time stream of the future does not refer to the domain of ‘possibility.’ It is not that the paintings of Bosch, for example, depict some possibility that will some day be actuality. The time stream from the future is a dimension of everything that exists, and is thus present now; it is the coming-to-be aspect of the now. We might also think of this dimension as the realm of prototypal imagination as distinct, for example from the realm of archetypal imagination as discovered and worked with by Jung. The prototypal dimension is the realm of the not-yet, of the coming-to-be. It also includes those forces that would attempt to diminish the sense of awareness of the prototypal realms, blocking an ongoing, subtle experience that as we live our earthly lives, we are also, at the same time, citizens of the cosmos.
There is a particular stream of spiritual initiation tradition in which the sense of the time-current from the future is central. I came to understand this stream through our development of of Spiritual Psychology since 1992. The many practices of this spiritual work came first and came out of meditative work. Only later did it become apparent that these practices, completely of this time and not atavistic, were within this spiritual stream of the time -current from the future. I will only mention the groups within that stream here, without going into the relation of the practices of spiritual psychology to them because the intention is only to locate Hironymous Bosch as belonging to this spiritual unfolding and to show that Kurt Falk was deeply perceptive in intuiting this fact.
This spiritual stream runs from the ancient initiatory practices of Mani, which began in the region that is now Iraq in the third century AD. It is of particular interest that Mani was a painter. The religion of Mani had this future-time current at its heart. Many of the spiritual groups within this orientation probably were not aware that they were working from the time-stream of the future. Thus, they took what they were doing as something that needed to be in the world as actual practices at those times – which got each and every one of these groups into terrible the terribly difficult positions of being labeled heretical.
I have also traced out an earlier branch of this spiritual stream that goes from Mani to Sufism. The Mani the stream goes then to the Cathars, and from there to the Templars and then to the Troubadour poets. From there is goes to Dante and the Divine Comedy. It is quite explicit that this great literary work is an initiation document and directly connected with the Templars. Then the stream goes to the development of the Tarot in northern Italy, and it is at this point that there is a connection with Bosch..
What happens after Bosch? Where does the stream go? Falk locates Bosch within the Rosicrucian tradition and then to Anthroposophy. That is certainly not a straight-line evolution. What seems to me to be most important is the continuing sense within each of these spiritual groups of being pulled by the not-yet of the future rather than being pushed from behind by the past. There is this same future-sense, the coming to be, the unfolding of the spiritual human being within Anthroposophy.
The Unknown Hieronymus Bosch
