For the world is war—the war of the opposites. Good and bad, night and day, man and woman, are all, as it were at war with each other, in the sense that two things can never be at harmony—harmony is always transcendence. Two things can be connected, conjoined, interpenetrated, but unless they lose the quality of duality, there will be difference, and differentiation ever true misery. There can be no world without duality, yet there can be no peace in duality. Thus transcendence is man’s only need. In transcendence there is neither man nor woman, day nor night (man is absolved into his human essence and night into day and day into time, etc., etc.). Truth therefore has been defined by the sages as non-dual.

The achievement of the non-dual, then, or happiness is realized through sacrifice, or prayer or meditation or by any name you name spiritual self-involvement. What then is the ritual of sacrifice? It is the offering of holy objects (camphor or flowers, or your beloved son Isaac, or of Jesus offering himself on the cross) to a central symbol of annihilation. In India it is the holy fire:

Here is the black night, here the white day,

Of their proper knowledge the two spheres turn.

The first oblateur: Fire, Agni, look at him,

He among the mortals immortal light.

Faithful light established that one see:

It’s thought, that most swift of birds!

And all the gods united and of one heart,

All of nature comes towards this power unique.

Far goes my hearing, and far too my sight,

Far also this light established in my heart,

And my mind of depths which goes far, far,

What shall I say then? And what discover?

(Rig Veda, 6.9)

Thus, the light within one, the immortal within one, within each one of us, is the fire with which we see, hear, touch, taste, smell. The outer sacrifice then is just to remind you, I repeat, dramatize to you, that every object which you perceive is poured, thrown into the fire of knowledge, which is the immortal within yourself, and he who has realized this, that he is himself knowledge, is the sage.

‘For that is no true wisdom,’ says St. Augustine, ‘which does not direct all its prudent observations, manly actions, virtuous self-restraint and just arrangements, to that end in which God shall be all and all in a secure eternity and perfect peace.’

And again: ‘For this alone can be truly called and esteemed the peace of the reasonable creatures, consisting as it does in the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God.3

Thus what man needs to reach harmony are the conditions in which this essence of God could be made manifest, the city of God. The constructor to this city is the wise being, he the sage-king. Or what Plato calls the philosopher king.