...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).
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”).