In the long history of thought, the number of works devoted to the question of “principles” cannot fail to impress: the principles of philosophy, the principles of law, those of the philosophy of law, etc. Why all this literature? Because it is driven by the idea that every field of thought is governed by principles.
It seems to have never occurred to anyone that there could be principles that govern thought itself. Yet this is the ambition of l’Arbre des archetypes (The Tree of Archetypes).
The subtitle sets the tone: “the Letters of the Hebrew Alphabet as Figures and Numbers.” There is a whiff of sulphur, or rather, kabbalah. Is J.F. Froger a Gnostic? Anyone who has had his hands on the book on the Gnostics in the Pléiade collection knows for a fact that this is not the case. But there are profound intuitions that need to be taken up again and set straight, with surer tools and higher inspiration. The author has accustomed us to the question of the enigma. He has devoted a book to it (Énigme de la pensée). Thinking is a mystery, and it is a mystery that belongs to man and man alone. Cows ruminate, rabbits scurry, dogs bark and caravans move on. Man thinks, from the Corsican shepherd who watches his sheep graze to modern man, who has all the time in the world on public transport to indulge in contemplation, now that the age of caravans has now past.
The book of archetypes explains this more technically and soberly.
I have had to read a lot of books in my already long life. Not all of them, only Mallarmé makes that claim, and that’s poetic license. When you have read a lot, and not always entertaining romances, you will have had to swallow a lot of scholarly, specious, clever gossip, but gossip all the same. So we appreciate concision. With Froger, it borders on a form of virtuosity. In his oral teaching, he is more verbose, circling at varying heights, descending into valleys, even deep ones. In his writings, we sometimes sink into apnea, but it is a training that is well worth it. Let us not pay too much attention to grumbling readers and savor this conciseness. For the introduction is a model of intelligence on the question of writing; in other words, the “birth of the alphabet.”
“Spoken language does not need an alphabet”—that is already a troubling assertion, even if there are languages that do not have writing. Written language uses signs to transcribe sounds. So far, so good. However, “the invention of signs to write a spoken language is an extraordinary abstraction.” If anyone doubted this, the very fact that phonology as a discipline only appeared at the beginning of the 20th century with Count Troubetskoy bears witness to it.
In the reconstructable history of the “invention of writing,” it was things that served as figures for the first writing: hieroglyphics. Letters are first and foremost words designating things, of which only the sound is retained for the process of alphabetization. The great adventure of the “written sign” begins with “a single figure and a single phoneme.” That is why, we are told, there is no such thing as an alphabet—there is always a syllabary. Taking its cue from Egyptian writing, ancient Hebrew would have devised a series of primitive signs; letters with signifying value: Aleph, the bull; Beth, the house; Gimel, the camel.
The use and order of these letters is not arbitrary; this is what this book seeks to show. The succession of Hebrew letters has an intelligible meaning, independent of the history of its production and emergence. To hell with the idea of a random deposit of “successively aggregated historical traditions” (first Egyptian, then Phoenician, etc.) and “progressively fossilized.” Of course, this is historically unverifiable; it is what the author calls “an axiomatic choice.” The letters of the Hebrew alphabet “have a unique specificity” and this justifies this book, which is a study of the astonishing mystery that each letter has a proper name and number assigned to it, and that they are organized according to a signifying order, which “arises from the need to describe the essential conditions of thought.” This is concise, but men and women of aspiration will find more extensive descriptions and explanations in Froger’s Structure de la connaissance. When linguists say that the alphabet is a finite set that can produce indefinite statements, they are not wrong. In the world we live in, the world of the Fall, this accounts for the reality of chatter and meaningless conversation. But for the author, “the system of signs of the alphabet is not simply a system for transmitting information… to speak is not simply to give information… it is to express man’s interaction with God and with other men.” The Hebrew alphabet contains a hidden teaching for the enlightenment of the soul, because “the whole universe is mediation between intelligence divine, angelic and human.”
It’s a far more exciting program than Guillaumian linguistics.
This alphabet is thus built on relevant language elements (the nail, the hand, the goad, etc.) to express another order of reality: “archetypal realities,” in reference to those concrete objects in the visible world, the world of things. These archetypal realities are precisely the principles necessary for thought. The letters give us an idea of them through the analogies that the objects they represent allow us to construct, and these analogies are set out in each of the twenty-seven chapters of this book corresponding to the twenty-seven letters.
Aleph and Beth alone build an anthropology. We will not go into detail. It is the third letter, Gimel, which inaugurates this patient teaching involved in the Hebrew alphabet. Gimel is the camel, the animal that makes possible that most difficult of things, the crossing of the desert, analogous to the other crossing, that which man must make to enter into the Word. This requires a truly divine energy. It is a question of “transforming the thing into a sign so that the journey towards meaning can take place” (p. 21).
We return to this question of language and tongues with the letter “Nun,” the fish. But it is not a good idea to go straight to the heart of the matter; you have to follow the order of the letters, an order that leads to the final chapters: the more global explanation of the order of the alphabet, the tree of archetypes, whose splendid illustration (and I am deliberately not giving the page reference) is a feast for the eyes. And for lovers of mathematics and Chinese puzzles, there is a freeze-frame: a “magic cube” (or semi-magic cube).
To understand this “exploration of meaning,” you need tools. It is a little complex, but it captures a commonplace fact of experience: at the root of all perception is contrast. It is not a figment of the imagination, it is part of the reality of the world.
Here, a little perseverance is required, as we enter the more technical dimension—the exposition of quaternary logic with its accompanying metaphysical categories: the impossible, the potential, the contingent and the necessary. These are not new notions, but they are being reassumed with more powerful tools, in a resolutely new paradigm capable of accounting for the meaning of this Word initially revealed in a given language. the necessary (in other words, necessity) and contingency are very old categories of philosophy, which still appear in Leibnitz’s Theodicy, and whose residue can be seen in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Heidegger gives philosophy back its “ontological” horizon, but in the affirmation of a human nature doomed to death. The progressive impoverishment of philosophy and the erosion of metaphysical thought from the time of the Enlightenment onwards have taken their toll on the idea of the existence of an intelligible world, a Platonic legacy that is still maintained in school philosophical culture.
At the heart of this journey, which represents the life of man, is the sign. We thus delve into the depths of the most distant letters of the alphabet—those that represent increasingly metaphysically-charged principles. Transgressing the author’s instruction to follow the order of the letters, let us take a giant leap and stop off in front of Tzade (the eighteenth letter). It represents the spear, the object of the world that represents justice in action. Let us invite even the most reluctant reader to continue to the last letter, the Tav.
Tav is the sign, and gives us the key to the problems associated with the symbol, with symbolism and symbolics (one of the foundations of thought and its condition of possibility, the other being logic). The Tav has a specificity, which is why it can only appear at the end—it shows no concrete object in the world, because “no object can analogously signify the fact that objects are signs.” “To have meaning” is symbolized by the fish (Nun); “to symbolize” is symbolized by the tree, and there are no letters for the tree; “to be true” is symbolized by the stone, and there are no letters for the stone. But to be a sign is a human decision, and to declare that all objects are signs “is again an axiomatic choice,” (meaning that it is unprovable). It is “the fruitfulness of this choice that assures us that it is relevant” (p. 93). For those baffled by the biblical scholar’s more massive oeuvre (Le livre de la creation, La couronne du grand-prêtre, Le livre de la nature humaine), this work is the best introduction to the key notions of his anthropology—ritual, transmission, intelligence and will, truth. All of this is implied in the Hebrew alphabet and “unpacked” throughout each of the compactly written chapters.
For Christians, L’arbre des archétypes is also a window onto the Psalms, composed by King David. And for those unfamiliar with this tradition, it offers a new window. The author not only reveals a “poetic use” of this form of prayer, a component of daily and Sunday liturgy, but also of the Book of Hours for contemplatives and the breviary for seminarians and priests. Each letter is accompanied by a short passage from one of the psalms, like little dancing lights in the deep valleys of Hebrew letters.
And since we are on the topic of accompaniments, let us consider the one on the first page, which from the time of Greek and Latin, is like that of caravans, a bygone era: “Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem” [“from shadows and images into Truth”], John Henry Newman’s memorial epitaph. An epitaph (I quote information kindly provided by Froger) that “reflects John Henry Newman’s spiritual journey towards divine truth, and evokes the idea of leaving illusions and appearances (but also received ideas) to reach a deeper understanding of the Christian faith.” Newman alludes to the creation of man in Genesis, where God says: “Let us make man in our image and likeness.”
We start from images (the forms of the world) as the data of creation, not to escape them, but as a starting point and support to enter the world of archetypal realities, (the principles). And we do so, (or must do so) because Revelation commits us to it, because it teaches from the analogy of the objects of the world, and because it puts these objects into the letters of the language in which Revelation was expressed.
Allow me a personal aside. In an earlier publication, D’or et de miel (Gold and Honey), the last page featured a representation of this tree of archetypes and the announcement of the publication of the book in preparation. I kept this drawing preciously for over twenty years, so as to have it in front of me as often as possible. At a secondary school in Amiens where I taught catechism, I made a two-meter-high by four-meter-wide montage of this tree of archetypes with my teenaged students. The nuns at the school were stunned when, with their approval, we displayed this improbable work in the hall, framed by two mischievously smiling Asian angels with a knowing look, all cut out of a roll of wallpaper. No doubt they took me for a dangerous Gnostic, because they never asked for my services as a catechist again.
L’arbre des archétypes is therefore a book of slow, deep breath. I waited twenty years for it. Count more than ten years (that is being consistent) before reviewing it. It will be of great benefit to those who have studied philosophy, to those who teach it, and to those who have been at odds with it since their senior year. It will satisfy all those who have ever wondered, “Where does writing come from, where does the written sign come from?”
I prolonged this meditation from my youth by contemplating, from a bank of the Mekong, a huge neon sign for Heineken beer on the other side of the river (in Latin characters). Then the Chinese came and it disappeared. But it is enough for me to watch a child laboriously tracing the first letters of the alphabet to rediscover the riddle of my ten years, and to feel compassion for the brave little ones whose first names are Népomucène or Eléonore.
Things speak to us if we deign to let go of the fascination they exert on us, to listen to what they point out to us, and hear their secret invitation to enter the great crossing that leads to the Kingdom. Even an advertisement for a Dutch beer.
L’arbre des archétypes is also a fine art book, to be leafed through in those moments when you remember that “all is right in heaven,” even if, as the poet says, it is said in such a low voice that no one ever hears it. Even the most sulky of readers will not regret having this book in their library: the illustrations are magnificent, almost Van Goghian, the same man who put swirls in his paintings. The hand of Bernadette Main, the illustrator of this book, is a very sure one. And it is worth noting the patient energy that guides her hand as she plunges into one of the most beautiful mysteries of human thought, revealing its profound intensity, releasing its power and allowing its paradoxical double light to emerge in the very matter of her drawings—the light of things hidden and the light of things revealed.
