I am feeling very chill lately. Had an appendix-removal surgery one week ago and I’m recoverin’. I wanted to write a little bit about the interpretation of Timaeus’ Creation-story in Alain de Lille, Bernard Silvestre, and other Chartres affiliates, following Calcidius’ commentary.

Worldsoul as a “Plane” of Complication

Let me begin with a quote from Alain de Lille’s Plaint of Nature, describing the informative, economic, creative force of God’s Nature, or the God-of-Four-Elements:

O child of God, mother of creation, bond-of-the-universe and its stable link, bright gem for those on earth, mirror for mortals, light-bearer for the world: peace, love, virtue, guide, power, order, law, end, way, leader, source, life, light, splendour, beauty, form, rule of the world: you, who by your reins guide the universe, unite all things in a stable and harmonious bond and wed heaven to earth in a union of peace; who, working on the pure ideas of Noys, mould the species of all created things, clothing matter with form and fashioning a mantle of form with your thumb...

Alain describes here what we Jews refer to as the Shekinah – God’s Homeliness. The Shekinah is the informative-principle – the “uterine” (as Alain himself words it) structure metabolizing the Godhead’s spiritual “excretions” and excessities. At the same time, she is also the animating-principle – the “virtue” and providence of the universe, instilling breaths and matters into substances. In that manner, she is truely the “God of the Four Elements” – in that she enflows matter-or-life into bodies (animation) and at the same time gives them shape and expressive delineation, division into particulars and species (information).
Gilles Deleuze, who was undoubtedly a 20th-century Chartrain, used the term “virtue” as distinguished from mere “power” to designate the continual living input of all-things through all-other-things. I don’t remember where, but he does say somewhere – “there indeed is a soul-of-the-world”. In his book on Leibnitz he approaches this issue:

The One specifically has a power of envelopment and development, while the multiple is inseparable from the folds that it makes when it is enveloped, and of unfoldings when it is developed. But its envelopments and developments, its implications and explications, are nonetheless particular movements that must be understood in a universal Unity that “complicates” them all, and that complicates all the Ones. Giordano Bruno will bring the system of monads to the level of this universal complication: the Soul of the world that complicates everything. Hence Neo-Platonic emanations give way to a large zone of immanence, even if the rights of a transcendent God or an even higher Unity are formally respected.

So the Worldsoul is a “large zone of immanence”, within which implications (infoldings, envelopments) and explications (unfoldings, developments) are “complicated” or composed together in a manner of consonance rather then in a vulgar understanding of “harmony” (Pythagoreans saw the “complication” or “consonance” of harmonic and dissonant intervals as the producer of true, non-vulgar harmony). And so, flows-of-matter and flows-of-form are complicated together, inputs and outputs, influences and effluences, animations and informations, under the banner of what Alain would call “God’s Nature”, what the kabalists would call the “All-Shekinah” or what Deleuze would call “the Plane of Immanence or Composition”.
Let’s hear what else Deleuze has to say in that page:

The world is the infinite curve that touches at an infinity of points an infinity of curves, the curve with a unique variable, the convergent series of all series.

In this beautiful line, Deleuze presents an issue – what is the meaning of totality within an infinity? (as an “infinite” totality can always be “challenged” by new greater, vaster sizes and substances, worlds and “curves”) – in that sense, the Worldsoul is not mere totality – but, I would say: wholeness. It is the whole of infinities, not “all” infinities, but rather a whole in the sense of consisting and upholding a capacity to an infinity of infinite things.

Tehiru – Calcidian or Stoic Receptacle?

The kabbalists refer to the Psychic Plane of Complication as Tehiru (an enigmatic term in Aramaic, appearing in the Zohar, describing a sometype of Receptacle for Creation). In kabbalah the Worldsoul or Shekinah is a receptacle closer to the Stoic idea (of a telluric womb digesting and producing forms) than to the Calcidian idea of the receptacle as a “screen” or “wax” upon which forms are impressed by the divine mind. Nathan of Gaza interprets the Talmudic hermeneutical method of Gizra Shava (“Shared Shape”) as a metaphor to the “sharing” of powers between the Shekinah and the Tehiru, as the Tehiru itself is a sort of an animal or “plane”. But the Tehiru itself is very much like wax bearing the Imprint (Reshimu, in Aramaic) of divine light. So it’s mixed Calcidian and Stoic idea.

Conclusions

So we have inspected into the mysteries of the Worldsoul, Shekinah and Receptacle today. It was fun! Gut Voch guys.