Faithful to Love

Painters & Sculptors

Poets & Philosophers

Origins

The Order of the ‘Fedeli d’Amore’ [Faithful to Love] is a secret society of men of letters to which Dante belonged and within which Guido Cavalcanti appeared as a master. It lies at the intersection of two cultures: one, Provençal, is the long line of troubadours and trouvères that was rounded off or polished up by Cavalcanti and Dante; the other, tingeing it with a new mysticism, is that of the Sufis.
The poetry of the Sufis met the West through the Crusades. In the quest of the Christian knights of the Order of Templars, an echo had sounded, and behind the outward historical hostility, an invisible encounter brought to the West the words of Ibn’ Arabi, as well as the thinking of Averroës, and the character of the ’âshiq. In the eyes of subsequent Sufis, the ‘Fedeli d’Amore’ seemed like an unexpected Florentine variant of the Shadhiliyya in terms of the privileged way (combining love and poetry) and going as far as the symbolism common to the systems (revolving, let it be said, around the mysterious number nine).

Initiation

The initiation of the ‘Fedeli d’Amore’ began before their entry into this little society: it was a question of the amorous experience itself, experienced at that time as an out-and-out mysticism, possibly, invisibly, abolishing the Christian one. “Love is a religion whose god is fallible,” Borges would say eloquently. Falling in love (if possible with a pretty young girl, a “damsel”) was the key to opening the enigmatic door to the heart. From the troubadours to the Beatles, every time love is consecrated in the natural idiom, in the scansion produced by familiar language that itself becomes foreign as it progresses within that love, it carries this dual meaning: a sacralization of the immanence, and also a destitution of the privileges of transcendence. The other world is in this world, experienced like a two-way mirror, and love is the key to this journey, love that makes it possible to fix time that forks in both directions and to materialize the Aïon within the body. The second step was to fail in ones gallant enterprise, with a view to preserving the erotic tension without satisfying it (akin in this respect to masochistic ecstasy or Taoist practices). The third stage started with familiarization with poetry, the acquisition of a linguistic practice that exactly copied the amorous sentiment: a passionate style forming a prelude to the meaning of life.

As will easily be understood, half the adolescents (both boys and girls) in the history of mankind have the basic qualifications to become Faithfuls to Love — unlike the Christian Paradise (which Dante would visit), there could be many chosen ones. But then when poetry comes into play, most of these chosen are found wanting and withdraw. For poetry, as practised by Dante Alighieri, Cino da Pistoia, Lapo Gianni, Gianni Alfani, Dino Frescobaldi or Guido Cavalcanti, demands an intellectual effort, a theoretical rigour that goes hand-in-hand with the invention of a style within which to make your thoughts flow. The quest is for a formal perfection where meaning and sound arrive at their cutting edge, that mysterious, magical round where melopeia, phanopeai and logopeai reach, in gentle speech and a low voice, their acme.

From yesterday to today

The initiatory organization of the ‘Fedeli d’Amore’ officially disappeared in the West at the end of the Middle Ages. Amongst its members, some chose to emigrate to the Middle Eastern countries, to Syria or Egypt, but others preferred to go very strictly underground. Yet some proofs do exist that the organization simply went into hiding and that it has survived in the heart of the West right down the centuries to the present day. From what is known, the organization no longer seems to exist as an initiatory order, for it is thought that since the Middle Ages it has only been a matter of singular cases and individual experiences. So what does being one of Love’s Faithful signify today? To be one, is it strictly necessary to belong to an organization constituted as such, with a hierarchy, initiation rites, and a secret language? Talking about the Rosicrucians, René Guénon warns us against this error: “Properly speaking, the term Rosicrucian is the name of an effective level of initiation, possession of which is clearly not necessarily associated with the fact of belonging to a certain defined organization.” The same is undoubtedly true for Love’s Faithful today.

When we refer to the Faithful to Love today, of course one can’t help thinking of this ancient organization that transferred to the East, a few of whose Western members are well known: Dante, Cavalcanti, Petrarch; but one must see here too a path and a way to spiritual fulfilment that since it went into hiding a few individuals have been using under circumstances still as mysterious as in the period when the organization existed in broad daylight: Raphael, Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno. Effectively, what marks out the organization of the ‘Fedeli d’Amore’ is its secrecy, which explains why its members have left so few traces, apart of course from the entire work of Dante — as long as one knows how to fathom its mysteries. In this vein, René Guénon points out that our times, dark and unpropitious to esoteric knowledge as they are, might all the same allow us a better understanding of it.

Of East and West

As we have said, there was a time in the West when the order of the Fedeli d'Amore existed as an initiatory organization and this time remains associated with the history of the Crusades. If one chooses to consider, as René Guénon does, that this period produced “active intellectual exchanges between East and West”, one will conclude from this that the initiation of the Faithful to Love rendered them fit to enter into relations with those from the East. But such exchanges were interrupted for several centuries because of the West’s ‘degeneracy’ in matters of esotericism. The twentieth century, however, has allowed access to texts by Eastern authors still unpublished in the West. Their existence from now on favours a better knowledge of the Faithfulness to Love, which is fundamentally both Eastern and Western. Does this mean that initiation into the order of the Fedeli d'Amore might have become possible as a result? To think that would be to misunderstand the very nature of the initiation — which is transmission — and yet René Guénon himself points out, in the conclusion to his King of the World, that “under the circumstances in which we are currently living, events unfold with such speed that lots of things for which the reasons still don’t appear immediately might well find — and sooner than one might be tempted to think — applications that are pretty unexpected, if not utterly unforeseeable.”

So the history of Faithfulness to Love in the West does not stop with the Order of the Fedeli d’Amore disappearing, or rather going underground. Here, the word ‘West’ must be understood in the way René Guénon uses it, in East and West, for example, as the geographic space of Christian tradition, compared to an ‘East’ that is of Semitic, Moslem or Jewish tradition. Besides, this would explain why Henry Corbin would have followed its trail towards Ibn ’Arabî, the theosophists and the Persian poets like Rûzbehân Baqlî, Hâfez, and Fakhr ’Erâqî. But the tradition of the Fedeli d’Amore is also a western tradition, in the sense that it concerns the three monotheistic religions, or rather the respective esotericisms represented by the Kabbala in the Hebrew tradition, Islamic esotericism, and Christian esotericism. Julius Evola and René Guénon maintain that it has its equivalent in the Far East, especially in India.

Be that as it may, the history of the Faithful to Love in the West extends beyond the period set by René Guénon — who does go on to mention Boccaccio and Petrarch, after Dante and the Fedeli d'Amore. This is why we must talk here about the ‘missing links’ that take this story right up till today. Little matter that nowadays they call themselves disciples of ‘Foi et Amour’ [Faith and Love], referring to an anthology of philosophical fragments by the German poet Novalis; they are very much in the same spiritual lineage as that of the Fedeli d'Amore. It will suffice to quote two of them, a poet and a painter, Novalis and Raphael: “The German romantic poet and the Italian painter belong to the same spiritual genealogy, that of those visionary artists who have been initiated into Faithfulness to Love by the providential appearance in their lives of a certain beautiful face — a human face, like that of Sophie, contemplated by Novalis with the eyes of his soul, or the divine image of the Virgin Mary, for Raphael, who received a revelation of it one night. »

Besides, evidence does exist of their belonging to the lineage of the Fedeli d'Amore. For example, Wackenroder reports this quotation from a letter by the Italian painter to the Count of Castiglione: “As one sees so few beautiful female forms, I am very attached in my mind to a certain image that has been born in my soul,” and transcribes a few pages by Bramante about the vision of an Image of the Virgin Mary that had appeared one night to Raphael. You really needs to quote the whole of this text, but we’ll just note that: “the most marvellous thing is that it seemed to him that this image was the very one he had always been seeking, although he had never had more than a dim, muddled presentiment of it” and also that: “the apparition remained forever engraved in his heart and in his senses, and he had then succeeded in reproducing the lines of the Mother of God as they had always floated before his soul, and he had always had a certain respect even for the images he painted”. If there were any doubt as to the presence of the Virgin Mary, in the initiation experience of the Faithful to Love, René Guénon reminds us that a lot of initiation symbols of the Mother of Jesus do exist, the application of which “is totally justified by the connections between the Virgin Mary, Wisdom, and the Shekinah”.
As for Novalis, a few extracts from Henri and Mathilde’s dialogue in his only novel, ‘Henri d'Ofterdingen’ (1801), unfinished, will enable us to understand why he is held as the purest representative of the western tradition of the Faithfulness to Love: “You are the saint who presents my requests to God, the intermediary through whom He reveals Himself to me, the angel through whom He allows me to know the plenitude of His love. What is religion, if not an infinite intelligence, an eternal communion of loving hearts? Wherever two people are united, He is in their midst. In you I find eternal breath, and my breast will never finish filling with you. You are divine splendour, eternal life in the most adorable package. If only you could see how you appear to me, what radiant image emanates from your body and comes everywhere to illuminate my gaze, you wouldn’t be at all afraid of getting old. Your earthly form is naught but a shadow of this image; certainly, the forces of the Earth struggle and go to great lengths to make it real, to confirm it, but Nature is still not mature enough: the image is the eternal archetype that participates in the unknown holy world.”

Under these circumstances, it may be asserted that the spiritual genealogy of the Fedeli d'Amore in the West was not interrupted, even though there’s no longer any question here of speaking of an Order — and besides, did this Order ever exist as such; was it not rather an initiatory organization, in the way René Guénon understood it? It is no less a certainty that this organization remains still active, though invisible. And after all, that’s all that matters. All the more so because its existence in the West is a manifest sign, today, that the Faithful to Love belong to “a spiritual elite common to the three branches of the Abrahamic tradition”, the ethics of which “have their origins in the same sources and sets their sights on the same height of horizon.”

So one last question arises: “Brought closer together in this community of worship and destiny, the Faithful to Love, in the West and in Iran, at least help us make out more clearly the edge of the path on which they were all travelling, mystics, poets, philosophers. Will the question be asked, whether the journey along their Way still has any significance for the circumstances of our own historical present, other than an historic one?” Henry Corbin remarks that “no general answer nor theoretical programme can be provided to respond to this sort of question.” And yet an answer does exist, that given by the very existence of Faithfulness to Love in the West today, from a tradition that has thus stayed alive and which remains fundamentally a tradition of East and West.