By Frithjof Schuon Translated from the French
Pub Date: 1989
Publisher: World Wisdom Books
Binding: Paper, 249pp.
ISBN: 0941532070
Our Price $12.00

Related Books: Comparative Religion
Related Audio/Video: Lings, Frithjof Schuon and Rene Guenon

"This book is, indeed, a serious challenge to the 'modern spirit' whose 'ideas no longer bite.' Highly recommended for all who seek an understanding of the 'traditional spirit.'"--Choice Magazine

Preface

Assuredly there are no such things as "problems of our time" in the philosophers' sense of the expression; that is to say, there is no thought that one could describe as "new" in its very foundations; there are however some questions that arose when "science" and "faith" began to part company, and which "belong to our time" because they have never ceased to engage people's attention.

Faith is the acceptance of that which we do not see, or rather, of that which transcends the experience of the average man; science is the experience of that which we do see, or at least of that whereof we can have an empirical knowledge. Traditional faith has been shaken or lost for reasons both subjective and objective; the "intellectual worldliness" inaugurated during the Renaissance and voiced by Descartes brought as its consequence a general diminishing of contemplative intelligence and of the religious instinct, while new facts, all manner of discoveries and inventions, took advantage of this weakening and seemed to inflict a more or less flagrant contradiction upon the propositions of faith. In other words, modern man was not--and is not-- "intelligent" enough to offer intellectual resistance to such specious suggestions as are liable to follow from contact with facts which, though natural, normally lie beyond the range of common experience; in order to combine, in one and the same consciousness, both the religious symbolism of the sky and the astronomical fact of the Milky Way, a more than just rational intelligence is required, and this brings us back to the crucial matter of intellection and, as a further consequence, to the topics of gnosis and esoterism.

However, modern scepticism, in order to take root, does not always require the prior misdeeds of Cartesianism; every sort of "worldliness," when aided by circumstances, is an opening for the spirit of doubt and the denial of the supernatural. Experience goes to prove that no people, however contemplative, is able in the long run to withstand the psychological effects of the modern discoveries, a fact that clearly demonstrates their "abnormality" in relation to human nature generally; in Europe, the hostility of the medieval Church towards the new astronomical theses does not appear, in the light of subsequent events, to have been altogether unreasonable, to say the least. It is evident that no kind of knowledge is bad in principle or in itself; but many forms of knowledge can be harmful in practice as soon as they cease to correspond to the hereditary experience of man and are imposed on him without his being spiritually prepared to receive them; the human soul finds difficulty in coping with facts that are not offered to its experience in the ordinary course of nature. The same holds true of art: it has need of limits imposed by nature, at least insofar as it is the prerogative of a collectivity, which by definition is "passive" and "unconscious"; one has but to put at the disposition of a people or a caste the resources of machinery and the chemical industry, and their art, regarded in the broadest sense, will be corrupted, not in its every manifestation of course, but insofar as it belongs to all. This does not mean to say that the majority of an artistic people are totally lacking in discernment, but rather that the seductive attraction of novel possibilities proves in the long run more powerful than hereditary taste; fineness of soul yields to the clamor of what is easy and offered in quantity, just as happens on the intellectual plane and other planes besides. Human nature is weak and prone to corruption; it is not possible for a whole people to be holy or even simply clear-sighted.

Howbeit, the tragic dilemma of the modern mind results from the fact that the majority of men are not capable of grasping a priori the compatibility of the symbolic expressions of tradition with the material observations of science; these observations incite modern man to want to understand the "why and wherefore" of all things, but he wishes this "wherefore" to remain as external and easy as scientific phenomena themselves, or in other words, he wants all the answers to be on the level of his own experiences; and as these are purely material, his consciousness closes itself in advance against all that might transcend them.

One of the great errors of our time is to speak of the "failure" of religion or the religions; this amounts to imputing to the truth our own refusal to accept it and at the same time to denying man both his liberty and his intelligence. The latter depends, in large measure, on his will, therefore on free will, in the sense that the will can contribute towards rendering intelligence effective or else towards paralyzing it; it is therefore not without good reason that medieval theologians situated heresy in the will. Intelligence can in fact slip into error, but its own nature does not allow it to resist truth indefinitely; for this to happen the intervention of a volitional factor is required or, to be more precise, of a passional factor, namely prejudice, a sentimental interest, individualism under its many forms. Every error contains an element of irrational "mysticism," a tendency that has nothing to do with concepts but which uses concepts or invents them. Behind every philosophical opinion is to be found some particular "savor" or "color"; errors are born of psychic "hardenings," "dissipations," "explosions" or "heavinesses" and these are, each in its own way, obstacles to the shining forth of the Intellect and to the vision of the "Eye of the Heart."

The darkening of our world--whether of the West properly speaking or of its extensions into the East or elsewhere--is apparent also in the fact that mental nimbleness for the most part goes hand in hand with intellectual shallowness: people are in the habit of treating concepts like mental playthings that commit one to nothing; ideas no longer "bite" into the intelligence and the latter glides over concepts without giving itself time to grasp them. The modern spirit proceeds "along the surface," hence a continual toying with mental images without awareness of the part these really play; the traditional spirit, on the other hand, proceeds in depth, whence arise doctrines that may be apparently "dogmatic" but which nonetheless remain fully satisfying and effective.

In reading the essays contained in this collection, it will be noted that we have in view, not traditional information pure and simple so much as intrinsic doctrinal explanations; that is to say, the expression of truths of which the traditional dialectics are the vestitures; hence it is not as a historian of ideas, but as a spokesman of the philosophia perennis that we expound diverse formulations of the truth that is everywhere and always the same.

One point that always seems to escape philosophical rationalists, is that there is of necessity a gap between the ex- pression and the thing expressed, hence between doctrine and reality. It is always possible to reproach a sufficient doctrine for being insufficient, since no doctrine can be identical to what it intends to express; no formulation can altogether take into account all that could be demanded, rightly or wrongly, by innumerable different needs for causal explanations. If an expression could be absolutely or in every respect adequate and exhaustive--as critical philosophy would have it--there no longer would be any difference between an image and its prototype and there no longer would be any point in speaking, or in thinking or even simply in language. In reality, doctrinal thought exists in order to furnish a coherent scheme of points of reference more or less elliptical by definition but in any case sufficient to lead mental perception towards given aspects of the real. This is all that one has the right to demand of a doctrine; the rest is a matter of intellectual capacity, good will and grace.

Everything has already been said, and even well said; but it is always necessary to recall it anew, and in so doing, to do what has always been done: to actualize in thought the certitudes contained, not in the thinking ego, but in the transpersonal substance of the human intelligence. Inasmuch as it is human, intelligence is total, hence essentially capable of the sense of the Absolute and, correspondingly, of the sense of the relative; to conceive the Absolute is also to conceive the relative as such, and consequently to perceive in the Absolute the roots of the relative and, within the relative, the reflections of the Absolute. Every metaphysic and every cosmology transcribes, in the final analysis, this play of complementarity pertaining to the universal Maya, and thus inherent in the very substance of the intelligence.

To return to our book, we would say that its dialectic is necessarily bound up with its message; it could not take into account the exorbitant pretensions of a certain psychology--let alone a biology--which tends to substitute itself absurdly for philosophy and for thought itself. We cannot in good logic be reproached for using a naive and obsolete language, since our dialectic is essentially justified by its content, which pertains to the Immutable.

There is no spiritual extraterritoriality; since man exists, he is linked to all that implies Existence; since we know, we are called upon to know all that is intelligible; intelligible not in accordance with our comfort but in accordance with human capacity and with the nature of things.