The Gold of the Grail

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he blue flower, the making of gold, the search for the grail, each of these images has its own story and all of them are a cipher for the impossible, for that which cannot be reached, but which nevertheless insists on being what is drawn on the horizon of desire and necessity. Heinrich von Ofterdingen dyes the world blue, just as Perceval decides not to rest a single night in the same place until he knows of the grail, or the alchemist insists on working in the furnace to, after the nigredo, albedo, and rubedo, witness the splendor of gold. Chimerical undertakings all of them, one might say, though capable of bestowing that which our world, devoid of mythical narratives, so yearns for: the meaning of the world and of life itself. Symbol images that become lighthouses for labyrinthine paths for which no exit is visible. But neither the blue flower, nor the grail, nor that "other" gold of the alchemists, which has nothing to do with common gold, can ever truly be conquered, we are told again and again. Their search has no end, or ends with life itself, although paradoxically it is sought because it has already been found, as Saint Augustine said. That feeling or intuition that "that" exists far away is what drives the search, incessant, unending.

Far away or within and, therefore, very close. From Carl Gustav Jung we know that these symbol images are an expression of our interiority. Thanks to them, the inner realm acquires visibility. Beyond the battles and conflicts, the grail rises, whose forms can be many and among them, that of the chalice, but whose material is always the same: gold and precious stones that provide such light that all other lights pale beside it. When in the Middle Ages one speaks of precious stones, one immediately thinks of colors, or rather, each precious stone is a color and color is a precious stone according to a perfect identification. If we set aside the objectual form that could be so imprecise that medieval painters resisted representing it, we find that the encounter with the grail consists of an intense luminous impression, a rich chromatic range, and the vision of gold. We are before an abstract image, between a Kandinsky and a Gothic panel, with its gold background that Giotto replaced with blue monochromes. Sometimes the gaze focuses on the gold, other times on the colors, and in others, the gold turns blue. We are certain that blue is not the blue of the sky and that gold is not the solar yellow. Neither the gold nor the colors refer to any element of the external world. The impression is very intense and we wonder why. Perceval, like us, marvels at the vision of the grail. Perhaps something resonates within him.

Long before Saint John of the Cross, Richard of Saint Victor in the 12th century imagined the ascent to the mountain as a precise image to speak of self-knowledge, that inscrutable duty from the oracle of Delphi, an imperative always re-actualized and which each era has understood in its own way. But "to know oneself," within a certain orientation, always implies knowing not only the subject who expresses himself with a first-person pronoun, but a much higher, much broader identity, which Jungian psychology identified with the unconscious. In medieval mysticism and also in the Renaissance mysticism of a Saint John of the Cross, the image of the ascent to the mountain was understood as the progressive process of annihilation of the self so that God could appear at the summit. Richard warns that the effort to reach the summit is very great but that much greater is the effort to remain there. Saint John warned that "even at the summit, nothing."

The ascents to the mountains, be it the Ventoux of Provence or the Acropolis of Athens, are intuited in their inner meaning. The gold of Priam's treasure shines with a power that shakes the soul. We find ourselves in the castle of the grail and we see, like Perceval, the procession pass and disappear into the next room. Above all, we see the gold of the grail passing by. But it is fleeting like a cloud. It overwhelms us but we do not ask. The next morning there is no one left in the castle to ask. Everything has disappeared. We leave the castle. The search begins. The gold of the grail can be thought and felt as the end of the search, as the summit of the mountain, where, suddenly, nothing becomes everything. In the 12th century and in the 21st century.