The Hollow Symmetries of Gustave Belval: On the Neglected Theorem of Ontic Reversal
In the fog-draped alleys of nineteenth-century Provencal mysticism and forgotten French spiritualism, the name of Gustave Belval—monk, metaphysician, and sometime collector of echinoid fossils—lies almost entirely erased. He is a thinker whose obscurity is matched only by the peculiar lucidity of isolated insights embedded deep within his posthumously published tract, _Les Théories de l’ombre renversée_ (Theories of the Inverted Shadow), released in 1879 by the Benedictine presses of Roquefort-sur-Mer. Among its most curious and hitherto unexamined doctrines is what Belval termed the “Ontic Reversal” (Renversement ontique), a metaphysical speculation on the dynamic symmetry between being and its self-negation. This brief inquiry shall isolate one passage—short, dense, and easy to disregard—and amplify its significance with reference to the broader philosophical implications of inversion as an engine of reality.
It is in Chapter VI of the treatise that we encounter the gnomic assertion:
> “Tout ce qui est, l’est par son contraire en fuite: l’ombre affirme d’exister parce que la lumière l’atteste silencieusement.”
> (“Everything that is, exists through its opposite in flight: the shadow claims existence because the light silently attests to it.”)¹
On cursory reading, this appears a poetical aphorism—perhaps no more than a gnostic paraphrase of Heraclitean flux. But the deeper structure of the sentence reveals a sophisticated ontological supposition: namely, that being (_l’être_) is not merely relational, but actively generated in the temporal retreat of its negation. This is not the Hegelian dialectic in any recognizable form; rather than thesis giving rise to antithesis in an ascending spiral of synthesis, Belval envisions being as haunted from behind by the flight of its anti-form.
His imagery of “contrary in flight” (_contraire en fuite_) requires magnification. At its heart is a notion that contradicts both substance-based metaphysics and pure idealism: namely, that every articulation of being is accompanied—as cause or residue—by a prefigurative non-being, a “luminous silence” that precedes affirmation yet cannot itself be affirmed without immediately becoming shadow. Here, Belval introduces a dynamic process that is neither Hegelian evolution nor Nietzschean becoming, but a third path—ontic inversion accrued by reversal rather than development.
This is clearest perhaps in his concept of “l’étreinte inversée” or “inverted embrace,” whereby form becomes actualized not through presence, but through a subtle “exile into form” enacted by the non-self of that form. Thus, in describing the behaviour of particles in the quartz-lined abandoned chapel he called his “salle d’oraison négative,” Belval writes:
> “Chaque cristal ici réfracte l’être comme une hostie frappée par une lumière qu’elle ne boit jamais.”
> (“Each crystal here refracts being like a host struck by light which it never drinks.”)²
This vision defies precise categorization. It is neither Platonism (because the form is not ideal and prior), nor Aristotelianism (because substance is decentered), nor even the panpsychism creeping through late Romantic metaphysics. Instead, we confront a universe in which all manifestations are retrocausally implicated by their own negation-in-absentia. That is, things exist not because they are, nor because they are thought, but because they flee from some primordial un-being—namely, their inverted double.
Such a position, though metaphysically unstable, might be seen as a radical evolution of the pre-Socratic tension between appearance and reality. But it must be emphasized that Belval’s “Ontic Reversal” is unilateral. It does not operate reciprocally; the non-being does not evolve toward being. Rather, it echoes or “pulls” being backward into itself like “a cloak of holes drawing its own wearer into wind.”³ In this respect, Belval’s closest analogue may be found in the Neoplatonist Proclus, particularly the doctrine of _anaphora_, wherein the One emits itself toward multiplicity only in order to return to itself enriched. And yet, Proclus sees this as a perfection of unity; Belval, in contrast, regards the reversal as tragic necessity—”le saut mourant de l’être en miroir” (“the dying leap of being into mirror”).
Why has such a concept remained buried beneath the silt of historical oblivion? Several reasons suggest themselves: first, the monastic character of Belval’s life, which placed him outside academic circles; second, the obscurity of his diction, oscillating as it does between lyrical affectation and metaphysical severity; third, the political unease within post-Franco-Prussian France, which may have rendered his essentially unpatriotic gnosticism unwanted. But perhaps the most damning reason is the atheological character of his notion. While Belval’s imagery is suffused with Christian symbolism, his metaphysics has little place for God. The reversal does not spiral toward divinity, but reverses into void-of-being. It is not that God is dead, but rather that God has always been _en fuite_—in the very act of being mirrored into existence.
There lies the true audacity of Belval’s theorem: it is not simply that things exist through opposition, but that every form slips away into its own anti-genesis immediately upon being. The world is not a created whole but a feast of absconded wholes, dancing shadows around a light that eternally hesitates to touch them. Thus, to the eternal question of _Pourquoi y a-t-il quelque chose plutôt que rien?_ (Why is there something rather than nothing?), Belval offers: “There is something only because nothing has not yet ceased to explain it.”
His theorem is an unsettling reversal not only of metaphysics but of explanation itself. The impulse to posit a positive cause (be it divine, material or ideal) is upended; causality proceeds, in Belval’s view, not from prior being, but from absent being. In this, he anticipates by nearly a century certain speculative ontologies of absence now explored in negative theology and continental dialectics.⁴ Belval must be reckoned with not as quaint fringe mystic, but as an obscure yet invaluable node in the long chain of metaphysical attempts to invert the tyranny of presence.
Future scholarship might well illuminate broader constellations related to Belval’s oeuvre: the alchemical echoes of _la matière inversée_, the topographic implications of his lunar cartographies, or his curious affinity for pre-Cambrian shell fossils. Yet none of these diversions should distract from the central cryptic gem of his thought—that prophecy of a reality fleeing itself, backward into the very shadow that animates it.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
ontology, shadow-metaphysics, inversion, French mysticism, negative theology, proto-absurdism, cosmological absence
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¹ Belval, Gustave. _Les Théories de l’ombre renversée_, Chapitre VI, p. 104.
² Ibid., Appendix B: “Journaux de la Salle”, p. 129.
³ From fragment LXXXVII of Belval’s unpublished letters to Sister Aimée de la Croix (Arles Archive, Box #42).
⁴ See Blumenbach-Schill, Elvira. “Absence and Reversal in Late Continental Ontology.” _Revue de la Métaphysique Fictionnelle_, Vol. 12 (2011), pp. 211–243.