Motto
In our days, when the monstrous state of confusion that has engulfed humankind seems to have thrown individuals and societies in complete disarray, one feels almost embarrassed to bring into discussion lofty spiritual matters which may be regarded as inconsequential and naïvely idealistic compared to the grave human problems that our terrestrial existence raises every day. Two thousand years ago, the Bible foretold these circumstances for which René Guénon provided a more recent account: “... the inferior judges the superior, ignorance sets bounds to wisdom, error prevails over truth, the human is substituted for the divine, Earth has priority over Heaven, the individual sets the measure for all things and claims to dictate to the Universe laws drawn entirely from his relative and fallible reason (from “Individualism”, in “The Crisis of Modern World”).
Thursday, September 4, 2008
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.