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
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].