Vanity

Tribal man, perhaps initially due to lice and other nasties, began picking himself clean. Soon, he discovered this could be done by someone other than himself. He in return would groom his mate. Vanity, vanity all is vanity! There is something about this weakness that is primordial and ancient. As long as there has been a man and a body of water for him to gaze into, vanity has been with us. For the Hermeticists, Adam looked down from the pleroma and gazed down into Nature and Nature loved him so much, she embraced him as he fell into his resplendent reflection in the waters. This is where the earthly shell makes its first mischieveous entrance into the story of man. Ever since, we have been trimming our hair, clipping our nails, and applying scents to make ourselves smell better and be more presentable. Entire economies, now, are based upon this weakness, vanity. A garment is eschewed for fashionable attire. Shoes are bought in amazing multiplicities as are jewelry, hair adornments and personal products. One could say vanity invented the city, where the earthly shell and all it's needs and wants, needed to be organized into a society of other vain peoples. Religion, acting as a counterweight to this initial overdoing of the physical, could be argued to be the response to this vanity. It seeks transcendence of the seen. And felt and tasted and heard and smelled. An equilibrium resulted where faith restored the balance to man's self love, where instead, the object of veneration became the stars. The sun. The moon. The earth. The other. Beauty was found outside onesself in the multiple emanations of the One God.

I certainly take a renaissance view of the splendor of man. It seems to me that man is the center of the Cosmos, a being fashioned by none other than God Himself, and as such, is due much wonder and amazement, and yes, a little pride. We occupy a space, have a breadth and depth, that even the angels cannot participate in. For, we, like the angels, have an immortal and incorruptible nature, but in addition even to them, we have a mortal part that they lack. So perhaps much of our suffering can be described as encouraged by the powers that be, because they are jealous of our unique position in the Cosmos.

And perhaps this is where vanity is indeed first made a weakness, where we gaze at and into ourselves, and find we are magnificent, and then attempt to be self sufficient, and apart from God. Perhaps then this is where separation and physical space originates then, in that we, being creatures of God, behold ourselves and in our beauty, think we can make it on our own.

But history has shown that our inner nature, that truly unselfconscious center, will only allow our vanity to go so far in that we think our way is the only way, our way is better, our way shall prevail, before it rightens the body and humbles it to the point of suffering and demands we worship the divine and transcendent. Mystery will not evaporate so easily!

And thankfully, it is so.