The Veil of Isis

In this wonderful article with a profoundly suggestive title, Frithjof Schuon demonstrates that by Its nature, the Higher Reality refuses Itself to the profane inquiry, which was made "for this world" but at the same time, can reveal Itself to the metaphysical intuition; it reveals Itself to the “pneumatic”, to the saint, to the gnostic, to the sage; but with the rationalists, Godhead plays an inherent but unavoidable game of “hide and seek” as if God were trying to show them that He is not of this world and that the gate to His Kingdom will never be unlocked by some cunning physical or mathematical theory.

Here is the opening paragraph from this inspired article:

"The explorers of substance, of energy, of the indefinitely small and of the indefinitely large, proceeding from discovery to discovery and from hypothesis to hypothesis, may well plunge into the mechanism of the physical world; they will undoubtedly meet with a variety of instructive insights into the structure of the physical categories, but in fact they will never reach the end of their trajectory; the foundations of existence have something indefinite to them and will not surrender themselves. Isis is 'all that has been, all that is, and all that shall be'; and 'no one hath ever lifted my veil'. It is useless to try to do so, all the more so since in this order of magnitude the useless coincides with the pernicious, as is shown by the myths of Prometheus, Icarus, the Titans, and Lucifer, and as is proven to excess by the experiences of the last two centuries.(1) [Roots of the Human Condition, p. 15]".

(1) It should not be forgotten in this context that modern science operates with instruments - in the broadest sense - that in a traditional civilization could not exist; this means that there are kinds of knowledge that, strictly speaking, have no right to exist.

Social Classes

A chiasmatic aphorism illustrates the past and present state of affairs: during bygone times, the noble man was wealthy (by God’s grace) and the wealthy man was necessarily noble; wealth devoid of nobility is a creation of modern era, starting approximately from the time of Renaissance (the infamous Medicis were one of the first notorious examples). As far as today’s “rich and famous”, the immense majority of them are pathetic and pitiful, if not plainly despicable.

Worldly Distortions

"...every sort of 'worldliness', when added 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 in general; in Europe, the hostility of 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 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".

Frithjof Schuon
In the Face of the Absolute—Preface

The Lord's Prayer

Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
[For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
now, and for ever and ever.
Amen.]

Religious Misdeeds

Scientism, like all the other evils of modern world appeared in the vacuum left by the moral decay of Catholic Church and the subsequent erosion of religious belief. The Holy Spirit could never fill the souls and altars of base and corrupt clergy often reduced to the roles of uninspired colporteurs and Protestantism added to the problem that it had endeavored to solve: “indignation against abuses brings with it the rejection of the positive principles that those abuses falsify”. Nowadays, when the influence of scientism on human realm takes such proportions, religion is powerless and often feels hypnotized by the persuasive domination of the rationalistic world-view, to which science seems to bring a brilliant and irrefutable empirical validation. In the words of Frithjof Schuon: “One of the effects of modern science has been to give religion a mortal wound, by posing in concrete terms problems which only esoterism can resolve; but these problems remain unresolved, because esoterism is not listened to, and is listened to less now than ever. Faced by these new problems, religion is disarmed, and it borrows clumsily and gropingly the arguments of the enemy; it is thus compelled to falsify by imperceptible degrees its own perspective, and more and more to disavow itself. Its doctrine, it is true, is not affected, but the false opinion borrowed from its repudiators corrode it cunningly ‘from within’; witness, for example, modernist exegesis, the demagogic leveling down of the liturgy, the Darwinism of Teilhard de Chardin, the ‘worker-priests’, and a ‘sacred art’ obedient to surrealist and ‘abstract’ influences. Scientific discoveries prove nothing to contradict the traditional positions of religion, of course, but there is no one at hand to point this out; too many ‘believers’ consider, on the contrary, that it is time that religion ‘shook off the dust of the centuries’, which amounts to saying, that it should ‘liberate’ itself from its very essence and from everything which manifests that essence.” [Light on the Ancient Worlds].

A Muslim Point of View

The misused and misunderstood derogatory syntagm, “Great Satan” that the Muslims apply to the West is at the same time fundamentally wrong and fundamentally adequate. It is false from a moral standpoint: Westerners are not evil or at least, not “more evil” than any other nations—in many respects quite the contrary—it is true from an intellectual standpoint: Western culture is a fountain of inexhaustible foolishness (the materialistic enslavement is another related and unsurprising effect which would clearly deserve more than a footnote). On the other hand, there is an irresistible lure in the luster of matter, a magic of cupidity and an attraction of turpitude in every soul, in the West and in the East—man is sinful by nature everywhere and Muslim clerics recognize that. What they instinctively fear is both the evil expressed by the “totalitarian and autonomous domination” of matter brought about by the encroachment of Western culture, but to the same extent, the intrinsic incapacity of human nature to resist it—we are never pushed through the gates of Hell against our will in which case we would be martyrs, but we hanker to cross their threshold.

Science and Religion

Historically speaking, the scholarly study of religion has its origins in the gradual shift of the academia from an overwhelmingly spiritual institution to a secular organization; theology, which once was recognized as the mystical philosophy of the supra-sensible was reduced to the rational investigation of religious matters—confiscated from the pulpits, it ended up relegated to the desk of the erudite scholar[1]. Following the introduction of the methodical study of religion in secular establishments (one is compelled to note the oxymoron), a multitude of ancillary utilities sprouted in the footsteps: anthropology, archeology, comparative religion, religious history, ethnology to mention just a few. With them, starting from the nineteenth century, hordes of religious scholars emerged, whose mental attitude towards the divine has been indulgent at the best if not indifferent, derogatory or completely hostile. Their method of investigation is similar to that of the researchers who study a microorganism under the ocular of a microscope: they could count its cells, describe its feeding and reproductive abilities but will never be able to explain what gives life to that creature, why it exists and why it was shaped in that particular form, ideas which go beyond the morphological and functional exploration of visible phenomena, directly into the essentiality of being. To give just an example of the mentality which characterizes the “objective” examination of religion, we could mention the irritating insistence on the “historical Jesus” which is either an unconscious (if one wants to warrant the religious historians the benefit of the doubt) or otherwise, a deliberately impious attempt to debase the sacred scriptures and reduce them to a collection of profane anecdotes. It is also an expression of the condescending attitude of scientism towards religion: “myths” needed the scrutiny of the objective scholars in order to unveil their secrets to the twentieth century mature and rational individual: “The question of the spiritual sense underlying the myths is one of those which people gladly relegate to the realm of feeling and imagination and which "exact science" refuses to treat otherwise than through the medium of psychological and historical conjectures”. Because he lost the sense of the holy, modern man cannot but trivialize it and reduce it to his demeaning mentality. In reality and to the extent that they are honest and sincere, religious scholars should realize that the sense of the sacred cannot be understood rationally[2] although it could be perceived intuitively, received by supernatural intervention and experienced mystically. The rendering of mythology in profane terms transforms it in what it is not: a collection of fictitious fables and obscure superstitions—a pattern of representation which nevertheless concurs with the preconceived idea of the immaturity, naivety and primitivism of the “uncivilized” man. These observations are all the more disappointing when the scientific outlook imprints on the disposition of the erudite with an open mind but still incapable to avoid the methodological and essentially profane avenues of science. On the other hand, the hammering of the consciousness of the believers with a multitude of inconsequential historic inferences and encyclopedic details left a permanent mark and the soul has become oblivious to any mystical dimensions—the noesis was cut short and for many, the Bible has become a place of earthly passions, saintly quarrels and dogmatic superstitions. Ironically, the skeptical, denigratory or flagrantly atheistic mindset of the religious scholars makes their endeavor frivolous and derisory not only de jure—from the perspective of the truth—but also de facto, that is from their own standpoint. Whoever seriously studies what he otherwise trivializes cannot help becoming the object of his own contempt: “since it is impossible to abuse directly a God in whom one does not believe, one abuses Him indirectly..., and one goes so far as to disparage the very form of man and his intelligence, the very intelligence one thinks with and abuses with. There is however no escape from the immanent Truth: ‘The more he blasphemes’, says Meister Elkhart, ‘the more he praises God’”.

[1] The church evidently preserved the right to teach its canons but could not prevent the apparition of these spurious parallel institutions which debase the essence of the sacred and trivialize its exoteric manifestations.

[2] Koans are the most representative expression of this idea, purposely meant to tax the understanding and ridicule reason.

Science and Reason

Schuon magisterially expresses the limitations of the rationalistic mind: “The common illusion of an "absolutely real" within relativity breeds philosophical sophistries and in particular an empiricist and experimental science wishing to unveil the metaphysical mystery of Existence; those who seek to enclose the Universe within their shortsighted logic fail to be aware, at least in principle, that the sum of possible phenomenal knowledge is inexhaustible and that, consequently, present "scientific" information represents a naught beside our ignorance—in short that "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (Shakespeare) and that in order to extend our means of investigation to fit the scale of the total cosmos, we would have to begin by multiplying our human senses in mathematical progression, which brings us back to the unlimited, therefore to the inaccessible and the unknowable”. [Treasures of Buddhism, p. 41-42]. In other terms, one can compare the scope of empirical and discursive knowledge to the segment of a straight line which contains an infinity of points, although, by definition, none of them lies beyond the extremities of the segment. This implies that man could reach by rational means virtually any stretches of this “horizontal” segment but will never exceed its boundaries, a fact which certainly does not come as a surprise to the scientistic mindset which postulated that there is nothing in the world which is not within reach of our discursive intelligence—ergo, the boundaries simply do not exist and the Universe is confined to the limits of our rational apprehension.

The scientific unrest, metaphorically called “critical thinking” can plastically be described as the struggle of the fish in an overpopulated fish tank and the phenomenon becomes even more obvious when the powerful support of empirical evidence cannot play a role as it is the case with abstract thinking in general and with philosophy in particular[1]—in these latter cases, ingenious but shallow fabrications provide a substitute for experimentation as the foundation of new intellectual buildups. It is not surprising that once the existence of the absolute truth or even the possibility of such truth came to be questioned, surrogates emerged: in this climate, myriads of ideas, ranging from simple opinions to sophisticated philosophical theories can compete with equal rights for the quality of truthfulness (the sacrosanct “freedom of expression” is just another metaphor for this diversity); in the absence of a normative intellectual framework, the world succumbed to intellectual chaos, euphemistically called “freethinking” and in this climate almost anything could be proven or disproved without too much pain if the premises (otherwise perfectly arbitrary) were carefully chosen.

[1] Although the methods of science and modern philosophy are different, their attitude regarding the ultimate reality are the same: a deep mistrust, aberrant distortions or complete denial.

The Scientistic Illusion

“Wanting to believe only what they see, scientists condemn themselves to seeing only what they believe; logic for them is their desire not to see what they do not want to believe. Scientism in fact is less interested in the real as such- which necessarily goes beyond our limitations—than in what is non-contradictory, therefore in what is logical, or more precisely, in what is empirically logical; thus in what is logical de facto according to a given experience, and not in what is logical de jure in accordance with the nature of things” [Frithjof Schuon-From the Divine to the Human].

With respect to truth, scientific knowledge is in most cases, an “unintentional” imposture. There are two types of imposture, although the quality as such always contains a certain measure of each: conscious imposture which is dishonest, deliberate and intrinsically immoral, and unconscious imposture which is “involuntary”, ignorant and sincere[1]. In its ignorance, unconscious imposture is always convinced of the paramount worth of its mission and so is science because “error creates the stage setting it requires to feel comfortable”. Not infrequently we encounter in the contemporary Western personality a bizarre cohabitation between an encyclopedic accumulation of scientific knowledge and factual information combined with a complete lack of intelligence and common sense. Such a person “…may be capable of the most extraordinary calculations and achievements but may at the same time be incapable of understanding the ultimate causality of things; this amounts to an illegitimate and monstrous disproportion, for the man who is intelligent enough to grasp nature in its deepest physical aspects, ought also to know that nature has a metaphysical Cause which transcends it, and that this Cause does not confine itself to determining the laws of sensory existence, as Spinoza claimed.”[Stations of Wisdom]. A complexion like this is innocuous and tolerable when complemented by a certain amount of compassion and decency and a “naïve” Paganel or an Einstein could be granted extenuating circumstances in spite of the dangers that their irresponsible play may bring to the very existence of mankind—however, an imagination (and especially collective imagination) rooted in absurdity and irreality and inspired by a mediocre or base moral character could lead to inhumane and appalling monstrosities: “nothing is worse than the mind, cut off from its roots”[The Transfiguration of Man].

[1] One should remark that blind religious dogmatism offers another example of “unintentional imposture”, with all its consequences.

Historical Downfalls

Unarguably, human beings (and all the more societies) have the ability to sanction their ideas and straighten out their actions because the “kingdom of Heaven is within us” and the Godly seed is imperishable. Or, to paraphrase the Gospels again, “men are laws into themselves” and there is indeed a self-regulating inclination, like the attraction of a gravity center which tends to reestablish “normality”, at least at a larger human scale. But these affirmations don't take into account that men have also perfect freedom, the “free-will” which is one of the attributes which distinguishes us from the other living creatures who are inexorably bound to follow the natural laws given to them by the Creator. Now, our liberty includes the ability to deny our own divine attributes and produce the most grotesque concepts or commit the most foolish and barbaric acts one could ever imagine. If this ever-growing degeneracy reaches a critical mass, we will predictably fall into our own trap and destroy ourselves one way or the other, not because God wills our demise but because even God cannot save us from ourselves.

Interestingly, such processes already happened in the history: there were societies whose spiritual, intellectual and moral corruption reached a point where downfall and destruction became unavoidable; think only of the Greek or the Roman empire (to say nothing of the “legendary” Sodom and Gomorrah). Religious paganism, a cult of matter, frivolity, a hedonistic or perverse life style eroded those civilizations from within and lead to their destruction by what appeared to be a barbaric, inferior population which paradoxically, was spiritually, intellectually and morally healthier than the “civilized” one that it replaced and dissolved.

But in 500 A.D., most of the world and those “barbarians” in particular were still living under the reign of a relative normalcy, perpetuated through tradition since Creation. Starting from Renaissance however, spiritual disorientation, moral frivolity and the materialization and narrowing of the intellectual horizon took over the mentality of Western man, proliferated to the East, especially since the so called “enlightenment” (thanks to a Peter the Great and other “luminaries”), and today encroached on most of the populated world. This sentence may sound outrageous to the ears of modern man, because it usurps the very foundation of his culture and civilization, but it is true although it cannot be explain or qualified in just in a few words.

What distinguishes our age from all the others is not its moral decadence which is an inescapable manifestation of our fallen nature (its exacerbation being a consequence rather than the cause of our decline), but the extraordinary state of confusion left by the disappearance of the guiding light of tradition. I often encountered in the Western personality a bizarre cohabitation between an encyclopedic accumulation of scientific knowledge and factual information combined with a complete lack of intelligence and common sense. Such a complexion is innocuous and tolerable when complemented by a certain amount of compassion and decency — however, an imagination (and especially collective imagination) rooted in absurdity and irreality and inspired by a mediocre or base moral character could lead to inhumane and appalling monstrosities: “nothing is worse than the mind, cut off from its roots”.

Patriotism (paraphrasing Schuon)

...Furthermore, there is Fatherland and there is fatherland, that is, there is the Kingdom of God, universal, all-pervading and all-encompassing and our homeland and “our people” or our social class, or our group whose interests are unavoidably selfish, self-centered and more often than not, materialistic in essence, that is, confined to the infra-human end of the human scale. When the Fatherland had the authority and prevailed over the fatherland (and certainly, that moral authority had started to erode long before the fourteenth century), God bestowed a quasi-sacred character onto a nation or ethnic collectivity and therefore gave a divine justification to its claim on absoluteness (one should note that some archaic people, such as the American Indians, the Australian Aborigines or the ancient Shinto Japanese used to call themselves “The People”, appropriating exclusively, in what would seem today at least a bizarre manner, the quality of humanness).
The kingdom of God should take precedence over the kingdoms of men not because religions dictate so but because it is imperiously necessary for our happiness — here, and hereafter. “God cannot primarily ‘take an interest’ in the well-being of creatures, since He wants their soul and their imperishable good and not the transitory things of the material world. If God also wants our earthly well-being is not because He regards it as an end in itself but because a certain happiness is the normal condition of man who, however, is essentially created with a view to eternal values. God takes interest in our well-being to the extent that we may profit from it in view of Him, and not otherwise; but outside this ‘interest’ – if this word be permissible here in a provisional way – God ;sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust’” (Frithjof Schuon — The Transfiguration of Man).