The Unknown Philosopher

Helene Marchetti-Vale kept on her desk at Harrowmere a small engraving of a man in a plain coat and a powdered wig, with a long nose and a patient face. Pages who came to see her sometimes asked who he was. "A friend," she would say, and leave it there. He was Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, who signed his books the Unknown Philosopher, and the Third Degree of this Order rests upon the way he taught. It seems right that the Grand Prior should tell his story, since it was his way that she was charged to keep, and right that she should tell it plainly, since he would have disliked any other kind of telling.

Amboise and Bordeaux

Saint-Martin was born at Amboise, in Touraine, on the eighteenth of January, 1743, into a family of minor nobility. His mother died soon after his birth, and he was brought up by a stepmother whom he loved, and to whom he said he owed perhaps all his happiness, since she taught him early to look for God within. He studied law to please his father and practised it for a few months at Tours, and found it intolerable. To gain leisure for study he took a commission as an officer in a regiment of foot, and in 1765 he joined it at Bordeaux.

At Bordeaux he met Martinez de Pasqually, whose order and doctrine are described in the third study in this series. In 1768 he was received among the Élus Coëns. He rose in the order quickly, and about 1771 he left the army to serve as Martinez's secretary. He took part in the operations of the order, and he never ceased to honour his master. But he began, even then, to doubt whether the long ceremonies were the only road, or the best one, to the end that both of them sought.

The first book

After Martinez sailed for the Indies, Saint-Martin lived for a time at Lyon in the house of Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, and there he wrote his first book, Of Errors and Truth, which appeared in 1775. Its title page gave as its author only "an Unknown Philosopher," and so did almost every book he published afterwards. He did not wish to be known; he wished to be read, and he wished his readers to look past the author to the truth he was trying to point to. The book is difficult. It is written in a deliberately veiled style, it assumes the doctrine of the Treatise without naming it, and it is directed against the materialist philosophers of the age. Enquirers who begin with it often give up, and the Reading Guide advises them to begin elsewhere. But it made him famous, in the circles that read such things, and opened to him the drawing rooms of Paris and of Europe, where he moved for the next twenty years, courteous, celibate, unhurried and more at ease, he said, with a few friends than with any company.

The Way of the Heart

Over those years Saint-Martin's way became clear. He did not condemn the theurgy of his first master, but he came to believe that it was exposed to error, that the spirits it called upon could deceive, and that it was in any case unnecessary. What the operations sought from outside, he held, could be found within. The human heart, purified by prayer and by the daily conquest of the self, was the place where the Divine and the human meet; and the one who sought God there needed no apparatus, no temple and no order, only sincerity and patience. Later Martinists called this the Way of the Heart, or the inner way. He himself put it best, in a letter to a Swiss friend:

The only initiation which I preach and seek with all the ardour of my soul, is that by which we may enter into the heart of God, and make God's heart enter into us, there to form an indissoluble marriage. There is no other mystery, to arrive at this holy initiation, than to go more and more down into the depths of our being, and not let go till we can bring forth the living vivifying root.

Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, Theosophic Correspondence

The person in whom this longing has awoken he called the Man of Desire, and he wrote a book of that name in 1790, a collection of short meditations and prayers which is, of all his works, the one most often found worn and annotated on the shelves of members of this Order. The desire he meant was not appetite. It was the soul's homesickness for its first estate, which most people feel only as a vague dissatisfaction with everything, and which the Man of Desire has learned to recognise for what it is and to follow.

Friend Boehme

In 1788 Saint-Martin went to Strasbourg, and there a friend, Charlotte de Boecklin, put into his hands the works of Jacob Boehme, the shoemaker of Görlitz who had died in 1624 and whose visionary writings on God, nature and the soul had been read for a century and a half by a small company of devout readers across Europe. Saint-Martin was then in his forties. He learned German in order to read Boehme in his own words, and translated several of his works into French. He said afterwards that he owed to Boehme the most important steps he had taken. He did not think that this meant abandoning what he had learned from Martinez. Writing to his Swiss correspondent, Niklaus Anton Kirchberger, Baron de Liebistorf, he said that his work was "marrying our first school to friend Boehme," and that he found the two spouses so well suited to each other that he knew nothing more perfect of its kind.

The marriage is the Martinist stream as the Order received it: the doctrine of the fall and reintegration from the first school, and from Boehme the conviction that the whole drama of creation, fall and redemption is enacted within the soul, and may be known there by one who descends into its depths in prayer.

The Revolution

The Revolution found Saint-Martin in Paris. As a nobleman he was obliged in 1794 to leave the city, and for a time his life was in some danger. He did not flee the country, and he did not curse the Revolution; he saw in it, to the dismay of some of his friends, a judgment of Providence upon a society that had forgotten God, and he wrote that it was a figure in small of the last judgment. In 1795 his district chose him, at fifty-two, as one of its pupils for the new teachers' college in Paris, and there he rose in a lecture hall to dispute with one of the professors on behalf of the reality of the soul. He was, by all accounts, entirely courteous and entirely unmoved.

Friends, not followers

Saint-Martin founded no order. He gathered no lodge and kept no rolls. What he had instead were friends: men and women in France, in Switzerland, in Germany and as far as Russia, with whom he corresponded, whom he visited, and with whom he prayed. Among the closest of them were women, the Duchess of Bourbon among the first, and Madame de Boecklin, to whom he remained devoted for the rest of his life. A later tradition held that he passed to some of these friends a simple initiation, by the laying on of hands, and that those who received it were known by the letters S.I.; the fifth study in this series examines what became of that tradition. The evidence for it in his lifetime is slight. The Order neither affirms it nor needs it. We have his books, and his books are enough.

His later works include The New Man and Ecce Homo, both of 1792, Of the Spirit of Things in 1800, and The Ministry of the Spirit-Man in 1802, in which he describes the true vocation of the human being as a minister, an intermediary through whom the Divine may act in the world. He died quietly on the thirteenth of October, 1803, at Aulnay, near Paris, in the house of a friend, at the age of sixty.

What the Order keeps

The Order keeps from Saint-Martin the inner prayer that is taught in the Third Degree, which Helene Marchetti-Vale received in her youth and transmitted to the Order in its first year. It keeps his conviction that the true initiator is not the officer who performs the ceremony but the Divine presence the ceremony invites. It keeps his anonymity, in the ideal of the unknown servant: Knights and Dames of the Order do not disclose their degree, and the deepest service is the service that is never recognised. And it keeps his insistence that the inner way is for everyone, in the midst of ordinary life. He lived in drawing rooms and on the road; our members live at kitchen tables and on railway platforms. The way is the same.

It should be said, for honesty's sake, that the cloak and the mask, which the Order joins to the sword and the spurs in the Third Degree, are not Saint-Martin's. They come from the Martinist tradition of the late nineteenth century, nearly a hundred years after his death. The Order adopted them because they say well what he meant. He might have smiled at them. He might also have pointed out that the best mask is a face no one notices.

Helene Marchetti-Vale used to say that reintegration begins when the seeker ceases to ask what the Grail is, and asks instead whom it serves. I did not understand this when I first heard it, and I am not sure I fully understand it now. But I think Saint-Martin would have understood it at once. The Man of Desire begins by wanting God for himself. He ends by wanting to be of use. The turning between the two is the Way of the Heart, and it is walked, as Saint-Martin walked it, one courteous and unremarkable day at a time.