modern (FS)

Transformist evolutionism offers a patent example of “horizontality” in the domain of the natural sciences, owing to the fact that it puts a biological evolution of “ascending” degrees in place of a cosmogonic emanation of “descending” degrees. (NA: We understand the term “emanation” in the Platonic sense: the starting point remains transcendent, hence unaffected, whereas in deist or naturalist emanationism the cause pertains to the same ontological order as the effect.) Similarly, MODERN philosophers – mutatis mutandis – replace metaphysical causality with “physical” and empirical causalities, which no doubt demands intelligence, but one that is purely cerebral. (Roots of the Human Condition, p. 5). sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

There are two points to consider in created things, namely the empirical appearance and the mechanism; now the appearance manifests the divine intention, as we have stated above; the mechanism merely operates the mode of manifestation. For example, in man’s body the divine intention is expressed by its form, its deiformity, (NA: We should specify: total or integral deiformity, for in animals too there is – or can be – a deiformity, but it is partial; similarly for plants, minerals, elements and other orders of phenomena.) its symbolism and its beauty; the mechanism is its anatomy and vital functioning. The MODERN mentality, having always a scientific and “iconoclastic” tendency, tends to overaccentuate the mechanism to the detriment of the creative intention, and does so on all levels, psychological as well as physical; the result is a jaded and “demystified” mentality that is no longer “impressed” by anything. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

The MODERN levelling – which may call itself ‘democratic’- is the very opposite of the theocratic equality of the monotheistic religions, for it is founded, not on the theomorphisrn of man, but on his animality and his rebellion. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

In other words, if man is intelligent enough to arrive at the ‘progress’ which our period embodies – assuming there is any reality in such progress – then man must have been a priori too intelligent to remain for thousands of years the dupe of errors as ridiculous as those which MODERN progressivism attributes to him; and if he is on the contrary stupid enough to have believed in them so long, then he must also be too stupid to escape from them. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

Again, if present-day man had at long last arrived at truth, he would have to be proportionately superior to the men of former times, and the disproportion between the two would be well-nigh absolute. Now the least that can be said is that the men of ancient or mediaeval times were neither less intelligent nor less virtuous than MODERN man. The ideology of progress is one of those absurdities that are as remarkable for the lack of imagination as for the total lack of sense of proportion they display; this is, moreover, essentially a vaishya illusion, rather like that of ‘culture’, which is nothing more than intellectuality stripped of intelligence. (Castes and Races, p.28-30). sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

All this shows that, to say the least, the word “philosopher” in itself has nothing restrictive about it, and that one cannot legitimately impute to this word any of the vexing associations of ideas that it may elicit; usage applies this word to all thinkers, including eminent metaphysicians – some Sufis consider Plato and other Greeks to be prophets – so that one would like to reserve it for sages and simply use the term “rationalists” for profane thinkers. It is nevertheless legitimate to take account of a misuse of language that has become conventional, for unquestionably the terms “philosophy” and “philosopher” have been seriously compromised by ancient and MODERN reasoners; in fact, the serious inconvenience of these terms is that they conventionally imply that the norm for the mind is reasoning pure and simple, (NA: Naturally the most ” advanced” of the MODERNists seek to demolish the very principles of reasoning, but this is simply fantasy pro domo, for man is condemned to reason as soon as he uses language, unless he wishes to demonstrate nothing at all. In any case, one cannot demonstrate the impossibility of demonstrating anything, if words are still to have any meaning.) in the absence not only of intellection, but also of indispensable objective data. Admittedly one is neither ignorant nor rationalistic just because one is a logician, but one is both if one is a logician and nothing more. (NA: A German author (H. Turck) has proposed the term “misosopher” -” enemy of wisdom”- for those thinkers who undermine the very foundations of truth and intelligence. We will add that misosophy – without mentioning some ancient precedents – begins grosso modo with ” criticism” and ends with subjectivisms, relativisms, existentialisms, dynamisms, psychologisms and biologisms of every kind. As for the ancient expression “misology,” it designates above all the hatred of the fideist for the use of reason.) sophiaperennis: What is a philosopher?

Howbeit, if finally the West had need of that messianic and dramatic religion which is Christianity, it is because the average European was an active type and an adventurer and not a contemplative like the Hindu; but the “Aryan” atavism had to resurface sooner or later, whence the Renaissance and MODERN rationalism. No doubt, Christianity presents elements of esoterism that make it compatible with all ethnic temperaments, but its formal structure, or its moral bearing, had to be in keeping with the fundamental temperament of the West, whether Mediterranean or Nordic. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism

On the whole, MODERN philosophy is the codification of an acquired infirmity: the intellectual atrophy of man marked by the “fall” entails a hypertrophy of practical intelligence, whence in the final analysis the explosion of the physical sciences and the appearance of pseudo-sciences such as psychology and sociology. (NA In the nineteenth century, the desire to reconcile faith and reason, or the religious spirit and science, appeared in the form of occultism: a hybrid phenomenon that despite its phantasmagoria had some merits, if only by its opposition to materialism and to confessional superficiality. ) sophiaperennis: Modern definition of Philosophy

While those errors tending to deny objective and intrinsic intelligence destroy themselves by postulating a thesis which is disproved by the very existence of the postulate itself, the fact that errors exist does not in itself amount to a proof that the intelligence suffers from an inevitable fallibility, for error does not derive from intelligence as such. On the contrary, error is a privative phenomenon causing the activity of the intelligence to deviate through the intervention of an element of passion or blindness, without however being able to invalidate the nature of the cognitive faculty itself. A patent example of the classical contradiction here in question, one which largely affects all MODERN thinking, is provided by existentialism, which postulates a definition of the world that is impossible if existentialism itself is possible. We have to take our choice between two things: either objective knowledge, absolute therefore in its own order, is possible, proving thereby that existentialism is false; or else existentialism is true, but then its own promulgation is impossible, since in the existentialist universe there is no room for any intellection that is objective and stable. sophiaperennis: Existentialism

What MODERN man is no longer willing to admit is above all the idea of an anthropomorphic, “infinitely perfect” God, creating the world “out of goodness” while foreknowing its horrors – creating man “free,” while knowing he would make bad use of his freedom; a God who, despite His infinite goodness, would punish man for faults which He, the omniscient Creator, could not fail to foresee. But this is to be hypnotized, quite uselessly, by the inevitable defects of anthropomorphic symbolism, a symbolism which moreover is inevitable and which has been proven to be well-founded by thousands of years of efficacy. It is to contend, not without a certain pretentiousness, against modes of speech which, though no doubt imperfect, are opportune in certain circumstances; and it is to shut oneself off from truth – including even the truth which gives salvation – merely for reasons of dialectic. (NA: As Saint Peter certainly foresaw: “Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation” (II Peter 3:3-4).) sophiaperennis: Nature of Modern man

Far from proving that MODERN man “keeps a cool head” and that men of old were dreamers, MODERN unbelief and “exact science” are to be explained at bottom by a wave of rationalism – sometimes apparently antirationalist – which is reacting against the religious sentimentalism and bourgeois romanticism of the previous epoch; both these tendencies have existed side by side since the “age of reason.” The Renaissance also knew such a wave of false lucidity: like our age, it rejected truths along with outworn sentimentalities, replacing them with new sentimentalities that were supposedly “intelligent.” To properly understand these oscillations it must be remembered that Christianity as a path of love opposed pagan rationalism; that is to say, it opposed emotional elements possessing a spiritual quality to the implacable, but “worldly,” logic of the Greco-Romans, while later on absorbing certain sapiential elements which their civilization comprised. sophiaperennis: Nature of Modern man

The wide range of forms belonging to Hinduism may be bewildering to some minds, but could never mean that Hinduism sanctions error, as is in fact done by MODERN philosophy, where “genius” and “culture” count as much as, or more than, truth and where the very idea of truth is even called into question by some people. sophiaperennis: Modern philosophers

There is a close relationship between rationalism and MODERN science; the latter is at fault not in concerning itself solely with the finite, but in seeking to reduce the Infinite to the finite, and consequently in taking no account of Revelation, an attitude which is, strictly speaking, inhuman; what we reproach MODERN science for is that it is inhuman – or infra-human – and not that it has no knowledge of the facts which it studies, even though it deliberately ignores certain of their modalities. It believes that it is possible to approach total knowledge of the world – which after all is indefinite – by what can only be a finite series of discoveries, as if it were possible to exhaust the inexhaustible. And what is to be said of the pretentiousness which sets out to “discover” the ultimate causes of existence, or of the intellectual bankruptcy of those who seek to subject their philosophy to the results of scientific research? sophiaperennis: Modern philosophers

There are no metaphysical or cosmological reasons why, in exceptional cases, direct intellection should not occur in men who have no link at all with revealed wisdom, but an exception, if it proves the rule, assuredly cannot constitute it. For instance, an intuition as just as that which forms the basis of German ‘phenomenology’, inevitably remains, for lack of objective intellectual principles, fragmentary, problematical and inoperative. An accident does not take the place of a principle, nor does a philosophical adventure replace real wisdom. No one has, in fact, been able to extract anything from this ‘phenomenology’ from the point of view of effective and integral knowledge – the knowledge that works on the soul and transforms it. A true intuition, even if it were fundamental, could not assume a definitive function in a mode of thought as anarchical as MODERN philosophy; it must always be condemned to remain merely an ineffectual glimmer in the history of an entirely human system of thought which, precisely, does not know that real knowledge has no history. sophiaperennis: Phenomenology

On the other hand, it is strange to note how far certain minds within the Latin Church have gone towards the acceptance not only of philosophical thought as such, but even of specifically MODERN thought: this attitude has led to a particularly regrettable lack of understanding of certain traditional modes of Christian thought itself, a lack of understanding which reveals itself above all in an inability to conceive of the intrinsic truth of those modes, or let us say in a fixed determination to reduce ideas to the level of historical facts. sophiaperennis: Philosophy and Christianity

It is the sophists, with Protagoras at their head, who are the true precursors of MODERN thought; they are the “thinkers” properly so called, in the sense that they limited themselves to reasoning and were hardly concerned with “perceiving” and taking into account that which “is.” And it is a mistake to see in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the fathers of rationalism, or even of MODERN thought generally; no doubt they reasoned – Shankara and Ramanuja did so as well – but they never said that reasoning is the alpha and omega of intelligence and of truth, nor a fortiori that our experiences or our tastes determine thought and have priority over intellectual intuition and logic, quod absit. sophiaperennis: Protagoras

As for the profane and properly rationalistic philosophy of the Greeks, which is personified especially by Protagoras and of which Aristotle is not completely free, it represents a deviation of the perspective which normally gives rise to gnosis or jnana; when this perspective is cut off from pure intellection, and thus from its reason for existence, it becomes fatally hostile to religion and open to all kinds of hazards; the sages of Greece did not need the Fathers of the Church to know this, and the Fathers of the Church could not prevent the Christian world from falling into this trap. Moreover through the civilizationism which it claims as its own, so as not to lose any glory, the Church paradoxically assumes responsibility for the MODERN world – described as “Christian civilization” – which nevertheless is nothing other than the excrescence of that human wisdom stigmatized by the Fathers. sophiaperennis: Protagoras

Reflection, like intellection, is an activity of the intelligence, with the difference that in the second case this activity springs from that immanent divine spark that is the Intellect, whereas in the first case the activity starts from the reason, which is capable only of logic and not of intellective intuition. The conditio sine qua non of reflection is that man reason on the basis of data that are both necessary and sufficient and with a view to a conclusion, (NA: It is precisely the absence of such data that makes MODERN science aberrant from the speculative point of view, and hypertrophied from the practical point of view; likewise for philosophy: criticism, existentialism, evolutionism, have their respective points of departure in the absence of a datum which in itself is as obvious as it is essential.) the latter being the reason for the existence of the mental operation. sophiaperennis: Reason and Intellection

Cartesianism – perhaps the most intelligent way of being unintelligent – is the classic example of a faith which has become the dupe of the gropings of reasoning; this is a “wisdom from below” and history shows it to be deadly. The whole of MODERN philosophy, including science, starts from a false conception of intelligence; for instance, the MODERN cult of “life” sins in the sense that it seeks the explanation and goal of man at a level below him, in something which could not serve to define the human creature. But in a much more general way, all rationalism – whether direct or indirect – is false from the sole fact that it limits the intelligence to reason or intellection to logic, or in other words cause to effect. sophiaperennis: Reason and Intellection

No people, however contemplative, can in the long run resist this psychological effect of MODERN science – the difference, in this respect, between men bearing the mark of the Renaissance and the traditional collectivities of Asia and elsewhere is only relative – and that clearly shows how “abnormal” this science is in relation to the basic facts of human nature. sophiaperennis: Scepticism

In other words, philosophy ignores what would be its own negation; moreover, it concerns itself solely with mental ‘schemes’ which, with its claim to universality, it likes to regard as absolute, although from the point of view of spiritual realization these schemes are merely so many virtual or potential and unused objects, in so far at least as they refer to true ideas; when, however, this is not the case, as practically always occurs in MODERN philosophy, these schemes are reduced to the condition of mere devices that are unusable from a speculative point of view and are therefore without any real value. sophiaperennis: What is the understanding of an idea?

Plato represents the inward dimension, subjective extension, synthesis and reintegration, whereas Aristotle represents the outward dimension, objective extension, analysis and projection; but this does not mean that Aristotle was a rationalist in the MODERN sense of the word. For the ancients, in fact, “reason” is synonymous with “intellect”: reasoning prolongs intellection more or less, depending upon the level of the subject matter under consideration. sophiaperennis: Plato

From the standpoint of integral rationalism, Aristotle has been reproached with stopping halfway and thus being in contradiction with his own principle of knowledge; but this accusation stems entirely from an abusive exploitation of Aristotelian logic, and is the product of a thinking that is artificial to the point of perversion. To Aristotle’s implicit axioms, which his detractors are incapable of perceiving, they oppose a logical automatism which the Stagirite would have been the first to repudiate. If Aristotle is to be blamed it is for the quite contrary reason that his formulation of metaphysics is governed by a tendency toward exteriorization, a tendency which is contrary to the very essence of all metaphysics. Aristotelianism is a science of the Inward expanding toward the outward and thereby tends to favor exteriorization, whereas traditional metaphysics is invariably formulated in view of an interiorization, and for this reason does not encourage the expansion of the natural sciences, or not to an excessive extent. It is this flaw in Aristotelianism that explains the superficiality of its method of knowledge, which was inherited by Thomism and exploited by it as a religious pretext to limit the intellective faculty, despite the latter being capable in principle both of absoluteness and hence also of reaching out to the supernatural; the same defect also explains the corresponding mediocrity of Aristotelian ethics, not to mention the scientism which proves Aristotle’s deviation from the epistemological principle. The important point to retain here is that the Monotheists, whether Semite or Semitized, could not have incorporated Aristotle in their teachings if he had been exclusively a rationalist; but in incorporating him they nonetheless became poisoned, and the partial or virtual rationalism – or rationalism in principle – which resulted has finally given rise to totalitarian rationalism, systematic and self-satisfied, and consequently shut off from every element that is subjectively or objectively suprarational. (NA: It might seem surprising that Scholasticism chose Aristotle and not Plato or Plotinus, hut the reason for this is plain, since from the viewpoint of objective faith there is everything to be gained by promoting a wisdom that offers no competition, and which makes it possible, on the one hand, to neutralize that interloper Intellection, and, on the other, to give carte blanche to any theological contradictions that may occur by describing them as “mysteries.”) The Aristotelian Pandora’s box is scientism coupled with sensationalism; it is through these concepts that Aristotle deviates from Plato by replacing the interiorizing tendency with its inverse. People say that the Church has kept science in chains; what is certain is that the MODERN world has unchained it with the result that it has escaped from all control, and, in the process of destroying nature, is headed toward the destruction of mankind. For genuine Christianity, as for every other traditional perspective, the world is what it appears to be to our empirical vision and there is no good reason for it to be anything else; herein lies the real significance, on the one hand, of the naïveté of the Scriptures, and, on the other, of the trial of Galileo. To try and pierce the wall of collective, normal, millenary experience is to eat of the forbidden fruit, leading fatally to the loss of essential knowledge and earthly equilibrium through the euphoria engendered by a completely unrealistic autodivinization of man. sophiaperennis: Aristotle

For Heidegger, for instance, the question of Being “proved intractable in the investigations of Plato and Aristotle” and: “what was formerly wrenched out of phenomena in a supreme effort of thought, although in a fragment ary and groping (in ersten Anläufen) manner, has long since been rendered trivial” (Sein und Zeit). Now, it is a priori excluded that Plato and Aristotle should have “discovered” their ontology by dint of “thinking”; they were, at most, the first in the Greek world to consider it useful to formulate an ontology in writing. Like all MODERN philosophers, Heidegger is far from being aware of the quite “indicative” and “provisional” role of “thinking” in metaphysics; and it is not surprising that this writer should, as a “thinker,” misunderstand the normal function of all thought and conclude: “It is a matter of finding and following a way which allows one to arrive at the clarifi cation of the fundamental question of ontology. As for knowing whether this way is the sole way, or a good way, this can only be decided subsequently” (ibid.). It is difficult to conceive a more anti-metaphysical attitude. There is always this same prejudice of subjecting the intellect, which is qualitative in essence, to the vicissitudes of quantity, or in other words of reducing every quality from an absolute to a relative level. It is the classical contradiction of philosophers: knowledge is decreed to be relative, but in the name of what is this decree issued? sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and Aristotle

A certain underlying warrior or chivalric mentality does much to explain both the theological fluctuations and their ensuing disputes (NA: Let us not lose sight of the fact that the same causes produce the same effects in all climates – albeit to very varied extents and that India is no exception; the quarrels of sectarian Vishnuism are a case in point.) – the nature of Christ and the structure of the Trinity having been, in the Christian world, among the chief points at issue – just as it explains such narrownesses as the incomprehension and the intolerance of the ancient theologians towards Hellenism, its metaphysics and its mysteries. It is moreover this same mentality which produced, in the very bosom of the Greek tradition, the divergence of Aristotle with regard to Plato, who personified in essence the brahmana spirit inherent in the Orphic and Pythagorean tradition, (NA: It goes without saying that in the classical period – with its grave intellectual and artistic deviations – and then in its re- emergence at the time of the Renaissance, we have obvious examples of luciferianism of a warrior and chivalric, and therefore, kshatriya type. But it is not deviation proper that we have in mind here, since we are speaking on the contrary of manifestations that are normal and acceptable to Heaven, otherwise there could be no question of voluntarist and emotional upayas.) whereas the Stagirite formulated a metaphysics that was in certain respects centrifugal and dangerously open to the world of phenomena, actions, experiments and adventures. (NA: But let us not make Aristotelianism responsible for the MODERN world, which is due to the confluence of various factors, such as the abuses – and subsequent reactions – provoked by the unrealistic idealism of Catholicism, or such as the divergent and unreconciled demands of the Latin and Germanic mentalities; all of them converging on Greek scientism and the profane mentality.) sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and Aristotle

Platonism, which is as it were “centripetal” and unitive, opens onto the consciousness of the one and immanent Self; on the contrary, Aristotelianism, which is “centrifugal” and separative, tends to sever the world – and with it man – from its divine roots. This can serve theology inasmuch as it needs the image of a man totally helpless without dogmatic and sacramental graces; and this led St. Thomas to opt for Aristotle – as against the Platonism of St. Augustine – and to deprive Catholicism of its deepest metaphysical dimension, while at the same time immunizing it – according to the usual opinion – against all temptation to “gnosis.” Be that as it may, we could also say, very schematically, that Plato represents the inward dimension, subjective extension, synthesis and reintegration, whereas Aristotle represents the outward dimension, objective extension, analysis and projection; but this does not mean that Aristotle was a rationalist in the MODERN sense of the word. For the ancients, in fact, “reason” is synonymous with “intellect”: reasoning prolongs intellection more or less, depending upon the level of the subject matter under consideration. sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and Aristotle

It is a mistake to see in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the fathers of rationalism, or even of MODERN thought generally; no doubt they reasoned – Shankara and Ramanuja did so as well – but they never said that reasoning is the alpha and omega of intelligence and of truth, nor a fortiori that our experiences or our tastes determine thought and have priority over intellectual intuition and logic, quod absit. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

One must react against the evolutionist prejudice which makes out that the thought of the Greeks “attained” to a certain level or a certain result, that is to say, that the triad Socrates -Plato -Aristotle represents the summit of an entirely “natural” thought, a summit reached after long periods of effort and groping. The reverse is the truth, in the sense that all the said triad did was to crystallize rather imperfectly a primordial and intrinsically timeless wisdom, actually of Aryan origin and typologically close to the Celtic, Germanic, Mazdean and Brahmanic esoterisms. There is in Aristotelian rationality and even in the Socratic dialectic a sort of “humanism” more or less connected with artistic naturalism and scientific curiosity, and thus with empiricism. But this already too contingent dialectic – and let us not forget that the Socratic dialogues are tinged with spiritual “pedagogy” and have something of the provisional in them – this dialectic must not lead us into attributing a “natural” character to intellections that are “supernatural” by definition, or “naturally supernatural”. On the whole, Plato expressed sacred truths in a language that had already become profane – profane because rational and discursive rather than intuitive and symbolist, or because it followed too closely the contingencies and humours of the mirror that is the mind – whereas Aristotle placed truth itself, and not merely its expression, on a profane and “humanistic” plane. The originality of Aristotle and his school resides no doubt in giving to truth a maximum of rational bases, but this cannot be done without diminishing it, and it has no purpose save where there is a withdrawal of intellectual intuition; it is a “two-edged sword” precisely be-cause truth seems thereafter to be at the mercy of syllogisms. The question of knowing whether this constitutes a betrayal or a providential readaptation is of small importance here, and could no doubt be answered in either sense. (NA: With Pythagoras one is still in the Aryan East; with Socrates-Plato one is no longer wholly in that East – in reality neither “Eastern” nor “Western”, that distinction having no meaning for an archaic Europe – but neither is one wholly in the West; whereas with Aristotle Europe begins to become speci fically “Western” in the current and cultural sense of the word. The East – or a particular East – forced an entry with Christianity, but the Aristotelian and Caesarean West finally prevailed, only to escape in the end from both Aristotle and Caesar, but by the downward path. It is opportune to observe here that all MODERN theological attempts to “surpass” the teaching of Aristotle can only follow the same path, in view of the falsity of their motives, whether implicit or explicit. What is really being sought is a graceful capitulation before evolutionary ” scientism”, before the machine, before an activist and demagogic socialism, a destructive psychologism, abstract art and surrealism, in short before MODERNism in all its forms – that MODERNism which is less and less a “humanism” since it de-humanizes, or that individualism which is ever more infra-individual. The MODERNs, who are neither Pythagoricians nor Vedantists, are surely the last to have any right to complain of Aristotle.) What is certain is that Aristotle’s teaching, so far as its essential content is concerned, is still much too true to be understood and appreciated by the protagonists of the “dynamic” and relativist or “existentialist” thought of our epoch. This last half plebeian, half demonic kind of thought is in contradiction with itself from its very point of departure, since to say that everything is relative or “dynamic”, and therefore “in movement”, is to say that there exists no point of view from which that fact can be established; Aristotle had in any case fully foreseen this absurdity. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

Far from proving that MODERN man “keeps a cool head” and that men of old were dreamers, MODERN unbelief and “exact science” are to be explained at bottom by a wave of rationalism – sometimes apparently antirationalist – which is reacting against the religious sentimentalism and bourgeois romanticism of the previous epoch; both these tendencies have existed side by side since the “age of reason.” sophiaperennis: Philosophy and MODERN times

It has been said that the flaws characterizing the MODERN West are rationalism, materialism and sentimentalism. According to the first, reason alone brings about all knowledge; according to the second, only matter gives meaning to life; as for sentimentalism, one ought to rather speak of psychologism, besides the fact that one should not confuse a given emotivity with emotivity as such, nor wish to minimize the defects of the East by exagerrating those of the West. According to psychologism, the spiritual and the intellectual are reduced to the psychic, hence in a certain way to the infrahuman: quite paradoxically, it is some rationalists who say so. sophiaperennis: Philosophy and MODERN times

The most specifically MODERN thought readily makes the mistake of introducing the psychological notion of ‘genius’ into the intellectual sphere, a sphere which is exclusively that of truth. In the name of ‘genius’ every distortion of the normal functioning of the intelligence seems to be permitted and the most elementary logic is more and more readily rejected on the ground that it is lacking in originality and therefore ‘tedious’, ‘tiresome’ or ‘pedantic’. However it is not the person who applies principles who is the pedant, but only the person who applies them badly; moreover the ‘creative genius’, by a curious derogation of his ‘inspiration’, is never short of ‘principles’ when he needs some illusory pretexts for gratifying his mental passions. sophiaperennis: Philosophy and MODERN times

The mentality of today seeks in fact to reduce everything to categories connected with time; a work of art, a thought, a truth have no value in themselves and independently of any historical classification, but their value is always related to the time in which they are rightly or wrongly placed; everything is considered as the expression of a “period” and not as having a timeless and intrinsic value; and this is entirely in conformity with MODERN relativism, and with a psychologist or biologist that destroys essential values. sophiaperennis: Philosophy and MODERN times

Yet even if allowance be made for such a lack of understanding, it seems that any honest man ought to be sensitive, if only indirectly, to the human level of these “dogmatists” – what is evidence in metaphysics becomes “dogma” for those who do not understand it – and here is an extrinsic argument the extent of which cannot be neglected. Whereas the metaphysician intends to come back to the “first word” – the word of primordial Intellection – the MODERN philosopher on the contrary wishes to have the “last word”; thus Comte imagines that after two inferior stages – namely “theology” and “metaphysics” – finally comes the “positive” or “scientific” stage which gloriously reduces itself to the most outward and coarse experiences; it is the stage of the rise of industry which, in the eyes of the philosopher, marks the summit of progress and of civilization. Like the “criticism” of Kant, the “positivism” of Comte starts from a sentimental instinct which wants to destroy everything in order to renew everything in the sense of a desacralized and totally “humanist” and profane world. sophiaperennis: Kantianism

The idea of the absurdity both of the world and of man, supposing this to be true, would remain inaccessible to us; in other words, if MODERN man is so intelligent, ancient man cannot have been so stupid. Much more is implied in this simple reflection than might appear at first sight. Consequently, before putting aside the mystical or experimental proof as unacceptable from the outset, one should not forget to ask oneself what kind of men have invoked it. There can be no common measure between the intellectual and moral worth of the greatest of the contemplatives and the absurdity that their illusion would imply, were it nothing but that. sophiaperennis: Kantianism

Cartesianism – perhaps the most intelligent way of being unintelligent – is the classic example of a faith which has become the dupe of the gropings of reasoning; this is a “wisdom from below” and history shows it to be deadly. The whole of MODERN philosophy, including science, starts from a false conception of intelligence; for instance, the MODERN cult of “life” sins in the sense that it seeks the explanation and goal of man at a level below him, in something which could not serve to define the human creature. But in a much more general way, all rationalism – whether direct or indirect – is false from the sole fact that it limits the intelligence to reason or intellection to logic, or in other words cause to effect. sophiaperennis: Descartes and the Cogito

Now, it is a priori excluded that Plato and Aristotle should have “discovered” their ontology by dint of “thinking”; they were, at most, the first in the Greek world to consider it useful to formulate an ontology in writing. Like all MODERN philosophers, Heidegger is far from being aware of the quite “indicative” and “provisional” role of “thinking” in metaphysics; and it is not surprising that this writer should, as a “thinker,” misunderstand the normal function of all thought and conclude: “It is a matter of finding and following a way which allows one to arrive at the clarification of the fundamental question of ontology. sophiaperennis: Heidegger

There are no metaphysical or cosmological reasons why, in exceptional cases, direct intellection should not occur in men who have no link at all with revealed wisdom, but an exception, if it proves the rule, assuredly cannot constitute it. For instance, an intuition as just as that which forms the basis of German ‘phenomenology’, inevitably remains, for lack of objective intellectual principles, fragmentary, problematical and inoperative. An accident does not take the place of a principle, nor does a philosophical adventure replace real wisdom. No one has, in fact, been able to extract anything from this ‘phenomenology’ from the point of view of effective and integral knowledge – the knowledge that works on the soul and transforms it. A true intuition, even if it were fundamental, could not assume a definitive function in a mode of thought as anarchical as MODERN philosophy; it must always be condemned to remain merely an ineffectual glimmer in the history of an entirely human system of thought which, precisely, does not know that real knowledge has no history. sophiaperennis: Heidegger

It is not surprising that the aesthetics of the rationalists admits only the art of classical Antiquity, which in fact inspired the Renaissance, then the world of the Encyclopedists of the French Revolution and, to a great extent, the entire nineteenth century. Now this art – which, by the way, Plato did not appreciate – strikes one by its combination of rationality and sensual passion: its architecture has something cold and poor about it – spiritually speaking – while its sculpture is totally lacking in metaphysical transparency and thereby in contemplative depth. (NA: In Greek art there are two errors or two limitations: the architecture expresses reasoning man inasmuch as he intends to victoriously oppose himself to virgin Nature; the sculpture replaces the miracle of profound beauty and life by a more or less superficial beauty and by marble.) It is all that the inveterately cerebral could desire. A rationalist can be right – man not being a closed system – as we have said above. In MODERN philosophy, valid insights can in fact be met with, notwithstanding that their general context compromises and weakens them. Thus the “categorical imperative” does not mean much on the part of a thinker who denies metaphysics and with it the transcendent causes of moral principles, and who is unaware that intrinsic morality is above all our conformity to the nature of Being. sophiaperennis: Rationalism

Independently of any question of naturalism, it frequently happens in MODERN art – as in literature – that the author wishes to say too much: exteriorization is pushed too far, as if nothing should remain within. This tendency appears in all MODERN arts, including poetry and music; here again, what is lacking is the instinct of sacrifice, sobriety, restraint; the creator completely empties himself, and in so doing, he invites others to empty themselves as well and thereby to lose all the essential, namely the taste for the secret and the sense of inwardness, whereas the work’s reason for being is contemplative and unitive interiorization. sophiaperennis: ART, ITS DUTIES AND ITS RIGHTS

Without wishing to be too systematic, it can be said that with most traditional artists, it is the element “object” that determines the work; with the majority of MODERN artists on the contrary, it is the element “subject,” in the sense that the MODERNs – individualistic as they are – intend to “create” the work and in creating it, wish to express their altogether profane little personality; whence ambition and the pursuit of originality. To be sure, the non-MODERN artist also, and by the nature of things, inevitably expresses his personality; but he does so through the object and by his quest of the object. Conversely, the MODERN artist – we mean “MODERNistic” – is necessarily preoccupied with the object, but within the framework and in the interest of his subjectivism; (NA : Let us note that originally, the word “subject” was a synonym for “predicate” and also for “substance”; it is only with Kant that the “subject” became the conscious, the knower and the thinker. But as this interpretation has become common in MODERN language, we follow its usage.) the apprentice artist no longer has to learn to draw, he has to learn to “create”; it is the world turned upside down. sophiaperennis: ART, ITS DUTIES AND ITS RIGHTS

It is significant that in extra-traditional art (NA: We are not speaking of ultra-MODERN pseudo-art, which for us does not exist.) valid works – which may be masterpieces – are necessarily accompanied by a flood of meaningless or subversive productions, and these often by one and the same author; this is the ransom of an excess of liberty, or let us say of an absence of truth, of piety, of discipline based on spiritual foundations. Unquestionably, this is the drama of all MODERN “culture” and has been so since its beginnings; and let us add that this culture ends by destroying itself, precisely owing to the contradiction between the rights it claims and the duties it ignores. Semitic iconophobia seems to be aware of this implicitly, even though its principal motivation is the danger of idolatry; this danger, in any case, contains in a certain manner and secondarily that of the cult of “genius” and of “culture.” sophiaperennis: ART, ITS DUTIES AND ITS RIGHTS

When calling the art of exactly copying nature an abuse of intelligence, we have indicated its analogy with MODERN science: artistic naturalism and exact science both comprise some valid aspects since they are true in a certain respect, but in fact the average man is incapable of completing this wholly outward truth, or these respective truths, by means of their indispensable complements, without which science and art cannot realize the equilibrium that is in conformity with the total reality which logically determines them. Everyone, today is aware that the efficacy of the experimental sciences is no longer an argument in their favour, since the calamities they engender arc precisely a function of their efficacy; likewise, it is not enough that artistic naturalism should represent a maximum of adequation, since it is just for this reason, given the use that has been made of it for all too long, that it has finished by depriving souls of a healthy nourishment adapted to their true needs. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

The analogy between artistic naturalism and MODERN science permits us at this point to make a digression. We do not reproach MODERN science for being a fragmentary, analytical science, lacking in speculative, metaphysical and cosmological elements or for arising from the residues or debris of ancient sciences; we reproach it for being subjectively and objectively a transgression and for leading subjectively and objectively to disequilibrium and so to disaster. Inversely, we do not have for the traditional sciences an unmixed admiration; the ancients also had their scientific curiosity, they too operated by means of conjectures and, whatever their sense of metaphysical or mystical symbolism may have been, they were sometimes – indeed often – mistaken in fields in which they wished to acquire a knowledge, not of transcendent principles, but of physical facts. It is impossible to deny that on the level of phenomena, which nevertheless is an integral part of the natural sciences, to say the least, the ancients – or the Orientals – have had certain inadequate conceptions, or that their conclusions were often most naïve; we certainly do not reproach them for having believed that the earth is flat and that the sun and the firmament revolve around it, since this appearance is natural and providential for man; but one can reproach them for certain false conclusions drawn from certain appearances, in the illusory belief that they were practising, not symbolism and spiritual speculation, but phenomenal or indeed exact science. One cannot, when all is said and done, deny that the purpose of medicine is to cure, not to speculate, and that the ancients were ignorant of many things in this field in spite of their great knowledge in certain others; in saying this, we are far from contesting that traditional medicine had, and has, the immense advantage of a perspective which includes the whole man; that it was, and is, effective in cases in which MODERN medicine is impotent; that MODERN medicine contributes to the degeneration of the human species and to over-population; and that an absolute medicine is neither possible nor desirable, and this for obvious reasons. But let no one say that traditional medicine is superior purely on account of its cosmological speculations and in the absence of particular effective remedies, and that MODERN medicine, which has these remedies, is merely a pitiful residue because it is ignorant of these speculations; or that the doctors of the Renaissance, such as Paracelsus, were wrong to discover the anatomical and other errors of Greco-Arab medicine; or, in an entirely general way, that traditional sciences arc marvellous in all respects and that MODERN sciences, chemistry for example, are no more than fragments and residues. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

No piece of knowledge at the phenomenal level is bad in itself; but the important question is that of knowing, firstly, whether this knowledge is reconcilable with the ends of human intelligence, secondly, whether in the last analysis it is truly useful, and thirdly, whether man can support it spiritually; in fact there is proof in plenty that man cannot support a body of knowledge which breaks a certain natural and providential equilibrium, and that the objective consequences of this knowledge correspond exactly to its subjective anomaly. Modern science could not have developed except as the result of a forgetting of God, and of our duties towards God and towards ourselves; in an analogous manner, artistic naturalism, which first made its appearance in antiquity and was rediscovered at the beginnings of the MODERN era, can be explained only by the explosive birth of a passionately exteriorized and exteriorizing mentality. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

In saying this, we know only too well that visual criteria are devoid of significance for the “man of our time”, who is nevertheless a visual type by curiosity as well as from an incapacity to think, or through lack of imagination and also through passivity: in other words he is a visual type in fact but not by right. The MODERN world, slipping hopelessly down the slope of an irremediable ugliness, has furiously abolished both the notion of beauty and the criteriology of forms; this is, from our point of view, yet another reason for using the present argument, which is like the complementary outward pole of metaphysical orthodoxy, for, as we have mentioned elsewhere in this connection, “extremes meet”. There can be no question, for us, of reducing cultural forms, or forms as such, objectively to hazards and subjectively to tastes; “beauty is the splendour of truth”; it is an objective reality which we may or may not understand. (NA: What is admirable in the Orthodox Church is that all its forms, from the iconostases to the vestments of the priests, immediately suggest the ambience of Christ and the Apostles, whereas in what might be called the post-Gothic Catholic Church too many forms are expressions of ambiguous civilizationism or bear its imprint, that is, the imprint of this sort of parallel pseudo-religion which is “Civilization” with a capital C: the presence of Christ then becomes largely abstract. The argument that ” only the spirit matters” is hypocrisy, for it is not by chance that a Christian priest wears neither the toga of a Siamese bonze nor the loin-cloth of a Hindu ascetic. No doubt the ” cloth does not make the monk”; but it expresses, manifests and asserts him!) One may wonder what would have become of Latin Christianity if the Renaissance had not stabbed it. Doubtless it would have undergone the same fate as the Eastern civilizations: it would have fallen asleep on top of its treasures, becoming in part corrupt and remaining in part intact. It would have produced, not “reformers” in the conventional sense of the word – which is without any interest to say the least – but “renewers” in the form of a few great sages and a few great saints. Moreover, the growing old of civilizations is a human phenomenon, and to find fault with it is to find fault with man as such. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

As for the MODERN world, it represents a possibility of disequilibrium which could not fail to be manifested when its time was ripe; the metaphysical inevitability of a phenomenon should not prevent us from declaring what it is in itself, nor does it authorize us to take it for what it is not, especially since the truth is by definition constructive, either directly or indirectly. Even what seems to be the most hopelessly ineffective truth, though it cannot change the world, will always help us in some way or other to remain, or to become, what we ought to be in the face of God. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

One might conceivably hold the opinion that the question of beauty is secondary from the standpoint of spiritual truth, an opinion that is both true and false, but it would be quite impossible to shut one’s eyes to the strange absence of beauty from an entire civilization, namely the civilization that surrounds us and that tends to supplant all others. Modern civilization is in fact the only civilization that resolutely places itself outside the spirituality of forms, or the joy of spiritual expression, and this must clearly have some significance. It is also the only civilization which feels the need to proclaim either that its own ugliness is beautiful or that beauty does not exist. This is not to say that the MODERN world in fact knows nothing of beautiful things or that it totally repudiates them – or that traditional worlds know nothing of ugliness – but it only produces them incidentally and relegates them more or less completely to the realm of luxury; the serious realm remains that of the ugly and the trivial, as though ugliness were an obligatory tribute to what is believed to be “reality.” sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

It has often been noticed that Oriental peoples, including those reputed to be the most artistic, show themselves for the most part entirely lacking in aesthetical discernment with regard to whatever comes to them from the West. All the ugliness born of a world more and more devoid of spirituality spreads over the East with unbelievable facility, not only under the influence of politico-economic factors, which would not be so surprising, but also by the free consent of those who, by all appearances, had created a world of beauty, that is a civilization, in which every expression, including the most modest, bore the imprint of the same genius. Since the very beginning of Western infiltration, it has been astonishing to see the most perfect works of art set side by side with the worst trivialities of industrial production, and these disconcerting contradictions have taken place not only in the realm of ‘art products’, but in nearly every sphere, setting aside the fact that in a normal civilization, everything accomplished by man is related to the domain of art, in some respects at least. The answer to this paradox is very simple, however, and we have already outlined it in the preceding pages: it resides in the fact that forms, even the most unimportant, are the work of human hands in a secondary manner only; they originate first and foremost from the same supra-human source from which all tradition originates, which is another way of saying that the artist who lives in a traditional world devoid of ‘rifts’, works under the discipline or the inspiration of a genius which surpasses him; fundamentally he is but the instrument of this genius, if only from the fact of his craftsman’s qualification. (NA: ‘A thing is not only what it is for the senses, but also what it represents. Natural or artifi cial objects are not . . . arbitrary ” symbols” of such or such a different or superior reality; but they are.., the effective manifestation of that reality: the eagle or the lion, for example, is not so much the symbol or the image of the Sun as it is the Sun under one of its manifest ations (the essential form being more important than the nature in which it manifests itself); in the same way, every house is the world in effigy and every altar is situated at the centre of the earth . . . ‘ (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: ‘The Primitive Mentality’ in Etudes Traditionnelles, Paris, Chacornac, August-September-October, 1939). It is solely and exclusively traditional art – in the widest sense of the word, implying all that is of an externally formal order, and therefore a fortiori everything which belongs in some way or other to the ritual domain – it is only this art, transmitted with tradition and by tradition, which can guarantee the adequate analogical correspondence between the divine arid the cosmic orders on the one hand, and the human or ‘artistic’ order on the other. As a result, the traditional artist does not limit himself simply to imitating Nature, but to ‘imitating Nature in her manner of operation’ (St. Thomas Aquinas, Sum. Theol. I, qu. 117, a. I) and it goes without saying that the artist cannot, with his own individual means, improvise such a ‘cosmological’ operation. It is by the entirely adequate conformity of the artist to this ‘manner of operation’, a conformity which is subordinated to the rules of tradition, that the masterpiece is created; in other words, this conformity essentially presupposes a knowledge, which may be either personal, direct and active, or inherited, indirect and passive, the latter case being that of those artisans who, unconscious as individuals of the metaphysical content of the forms they have learned to create, know not how to resist the corrosive influence of the MODERN West.) Consequently, individual taste plays only a relatively subordinate part in the production of the forms of such an art, and this taste will be reduced to nothing as soon as the individual finds himself face to face with a form which is foreign to the spirit of his own Tradition; that is what happens in the case of a people unfamiliar with Western civilization when they encounter the forms imported from the West. However, for this to happen, it is necessary that the people accepting such confusion should no longer be fully Conscious of their own spiritual genius, or in other terms, that they should no longer be capable of understanding the forms with which they are still surrounded and in which they live; it is in fact a proof that the people in question are already suffering from a certain decadence. Because of this fact, they are led to accept MODERN ugliness all the more easily because it may answer to certain inferior possibilities that those people are already spontaneously seeking to realize, no matter how, and it may well be quite subconsciously; therefore, the unreasoning readiness with which only too many Orientals (possibly even the great majority) accept things which are utterly incompatible with the spirit of their Tradition is best explained by the fascination exercised over an ordinary person by something corresponding to an as yet unexhausted possibility, this possibility being, in the present case, simply that of arbitrariness or want of principle. However that may be, and without wishing to attach too much importance to this explanation of what appears to be the complete lack of taste shown by Orientals, there is one fact which is absolutely certain, namely that very many Orientals themselves no longer understand the sense of the forms they inherited from their ancestors, together with their whole Tradition. All that has just been said applies of course first and foremost and a fortiori to the nations of the West themselves who, after having created – we will not say ‘invented’- a perfect traditional art, proceeded to disown it in favour of the residues of the individualistic and empty art of the Graeco-Ro mans, which has finally led to the artistic chaos of the MODERN world. We know very well that there are some who will not at any price admit the unintelligibility or the ugliness of the MODERN world, and who readily employ the word ‘aesthetic’, with a derogatory nuance similar to that attaching to the words ‘picturesque’ and ‘romantic’, in order to discredit in advance the importance of forms, so that they may find themselves more at ease in the enclosed system of their own barbarism. Such an attitude has nothing surprising in it when it concerns avowed MODERNists, but it is worse than illogical, not to say rather despicable, coming from those who claim to belong to the Christian civilization; for to reduce the spontaneous and normal language of Christian art – a language the beauty of which can hardly be questioned – to a worldly matter of ‘taste’- as if medieval art could have been the product of mere caprice – amounts to admitting that the signs stamped by the genius of Christianity on all its direct and indirect expressions were only a contingency unrelated to that genius and devoid of serious importance, or even due to a mental inferiority; for ‘only the spirit matters’- so say certain ignorant people imbued with hypocritical, iconoclastic, blasphemous and impotent puritanism, who pronounce the word ‘spirit’ all the more readily because they are the last to know what it really stands for. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

The majority of MODERNs who claim to understand art are convinced that Byzantine or Romanesque art is in no way superior to MODERN art, and that a Byzantine or Romanesque Virgin resembles Mary no more than do her naturalistic images, in fact rather the contrary. The answer is, however, quite simple: the Byzantine Virgin – which traditionally goes back to Saint Luke and the Angels – is infinitely closer to the ‘truth’ of Mary than a naturalistic image, which of necessity is always that of another woman. Only one of two things is possible: either the artist presents an absolutely correct portrait of the Virgin from a physical point of view, in which case it will be necessary for the artist to have seen the Virgin, a condition which obviously cannot be fulfilled – setting aside the fact that all naturalistic painting is an abuse – or else the artist will present a perfectly adequate symbol of the Virgin, but in this case physical resemblance, without being absolutely excluded, is no longer at all in question. It is this second solution – the only one that makes sense – which is realized in icons; what they do not express by means of a physical resemblance, they express by the abstract but immediate language of symbolism, a language which is built up of precision and imponderables both together. Thus the icon, in addition to the beatific power which is inherent in it by reason of its sacramental character, transmits the holiness or inner reality of the Virgin and hence the universal reality of which the Virgin herself is an expression; in contributing both to a state of contemplation and to a metaphysical reality, the icon becomes a support of intellection, whereas a naturalistic image transmits only the fact – apart from its obvious and inevitable lie – that Mary was a woman. It is true that in the case of a particular icon it may happen that the proportions and features are those of the living Virgin, but such a likeness, if it really came to pass, would be independent of the symbolism of the image and could only be the result of a special inspiration, no doubt an unconscious one on the part of the artist himself. Naturalistic art could moreover be legitimate up to a certain point if it was used exclusively to set on record the features of the saints, since the contemplation of saints (the Hindu darshan) can be a very precious help in the spiritual way, owing to the fact that their outward appearance conveys, as it were, the perfume of their spirituality; but the use in this limited manner of a partial and ‘disciplined’ naturalism corresponds only to a very remote possibility. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

To come back to the symbolic and spiritual quality of the icon: one’s ability to perceive the spiritual quality of an icon or any other symbol is a question of contemplative intelligence and also of ‘sacred science’. However, it is certainly false to claim, in justification of naturalism, that the people need an ‘accessible’, that is to say a platitudinous art, for it is riot the ‘people’ who gave birth to the Renaissance; the art of the latter, like all the ‘fine art’ which is derived from it, is on the contrary an offence to the piety of the simple person. The artistic ideals of the Renaissance and of all MODERN art are therefore very far removed from what the people need, and, in fact, nearly all the miraculous Virgins to which people are attracted are Byzantine or Romanesque; and who would presume to argue that the black colouring of some of them agrees with popular taste or is particularly accessible to it? On the other hand, the Virgins made by the hands of the people, when they have not been corrupted by the influence of academic art, are very much more ‘real’, even in a subjective way, than those of the latter; and even if one were prepared to admit that the majority demand empty or unintelligent images, can it be said that the needs of the elite are never to be taken into consideration? sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

In the preceding paragraphs, we have already implicitly answered the question as to whether sacred art is meant to cater for the intellectual elite alone, or whether it has something to offer to the man of average intelligence. This question solves itself when one takes into consideration the universality of all symbolism, for this universality enables sacred art to transmit – apart from metaphysical truths and facts derived from sacred history – not only spiritual states of the mind, but psychological attitudes which are accessible to all men; in MODERN parlance, one might say that such art is both profound and ‘naïve’ at the same time, and this combination of profundity and ‘naivety’ is precisely one of the dominant characteristics of sacred art. The ‘ingenuousness’ or ‘candour’ of such art, far from being due to a spontaneous or affected inferiority, reveals on the contrary the normal state of the human soul, whether it be that of the average or of the aboveaverage man; the apparent ‘intelligence’ of naturalism, on the .other hand, that is to say, its wellnigh satanic skill in copying Nature and thus transmitting nothing but the hollow shell of beings and things, can only correspond to a deformed mentality, we might say to one which has deviated from primordial simplicity or ‘innocence’. It goes without saying that such a deformation, resulting as it does from intellectual superficiality and mental virtuosity, is incompatible with the traditional spirit and consequently finds no place in a civilization that has remained faithful to that spirit. Therefore if sacred art appeals to contemplative intelligence, it likewise appeals to normal human sensibility. This means that such art alone possesses a universal language, and that none is better fitted to appeal, not only to an elite, but also to the people at large. Let us remember, too, as far as the apparently ‘childish’ aspect of the traditional mentality is concerned, Christ’s injunction to be ‘as little children’ and ‘simple as doves’, words which, no matter what may be their spiritual meaning, also quite plainly refer to psychological realities. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

The monks of the eighth century, very different from those religious authorities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who betrayed Christian art by abandoning it to the impure passions of worldly men and the ignorant imagination of the profane, were fully conscious of the holiness of every kind of means able to express the Tradition. They stipulated, at the second council of Nicaea, that ‘art’ (i.e. ‘the perfection of work’) alone belongs to the painter, while ordinance (the choice of the subject) and disposition (the treatment of the subject from the symbolical as well as the technical or material points of view) belongs to the Fathers. (Non est pictoris – ejus enim sola ars est-rerum ordinatio et dispositio Patrum nostrorum.) This amounts to placing all artistic initiative under the direct and active authority of the spiritual leaders of Christianity. Such being the case, how can one explain the fact that during recent centuries, religious circles have for the most part shown such a regret table lack of understanding in respect of all those things which, having an artistic character, are, as they fondly believe, only external matters? First of all, admitting a priori the elimination of every esoteric influence, there is the fact that a religious perspective as such has a tendency to identify itself with the moral point of view, which stresses merit only and believes it is neces sary to ignore the sanctifying quality of intellectual knowledge and, as a result, the value of the supports of such knowledge; now, the perfection of sensible forms is no more ‘meritorious in the moral sense than the intellections which those forms reflect and transmit, and it is therefore only logical that symbolic forms, when they are no longer understood, should be relegated to the background, and even forsaken, in order to be replaced by forms which will no longer appeal to the intelligence, but only to a sentimental imagination capable of inspiring the meritorious act – at least such is the belief of the man of limited intelligence. However, this sort of speculative provocation of reactions by resorting to means of a superficial and vulgar nature will, in the last analysis, prove to be illusory, for, in reality, nothing can be better fitted to influence the deeper dispositions of the soul than sacred art. Profane art, on the contrary, even if it be of some psychological value in the case of souls of inferior intelligence, soon exhausts its means, by the very fact of their superficiality and vulgarity, after which it can only provoke reactions of contempt; these are only too common, and may be considered as a ‘rebound’ of the contempt in which sacred art was held by profane art, especially in its earlier stages. (NA: In the same way, the hostility of the representatives of exotericism for all that lies beyond their comprehension results in an increasingly ‘massive’ exotericism which cannot but suffer from ‘rifts’; but the ‘spiritual porousness’ of Tradition – that is to say the immanence in the ‘substance’ of exotericism of a transcendent ‘dimension’ which makes up for its ‘massiveness,’- this state of ‘porousness’ having been lost, the above-mentioned ‘rifts’ could only be produced from below; which means the replacement of the masters of medieval esotericism by the protagonists of MODERN unbelief.) It has been a matter of current experience that nothing is able to offer to irreligion a more immediately tangible nourishment than the insipid hypocrisy of religious images; that which was meant to stimulate piety in the believer, but serves to confirm unbelievers in their impiety, whereas it must be recognized that genuinely sacred art does not possess this character of a ‘two-edged weapon’, for being itself more abstract, it offers less hold to hostile psychological reactions. Now, no matter what may be the theories that attribute to the people the need for unintelligent images, warped in their essence, the elites do exist and certainly require something different; what they demand is an art corresponding to their own spirit and in which their soul can come to rest, finding itself again in order to mount to the Divine. Such an art cannot spring simply from profane taste, nor even from ‘genius’, but must proceed essentially out of Tradition; this fact being admitted, the masterpiece must be executed by a sanctified artist or, let us say, by one in a state of grace’. (NA: The icon-painters were monks who, before setting to work, prepared themselves by fasting, prayer, confession and communion; it even happened that the colours were mixed with holy water and the dust from relics, as would not have been possible had the icon not possessed a really sacramental character.) Far from serving only for the more or less superficial instruction and edification of the masses, the icon, as is the case with the Hindu yantra and all other visible symbols, establishes a bridge from the sensible to the spiritual: ‘By the visible aspect’, states St. John Damascenus, ‘our thoughts must be drawn up in a spiritual flight and rise to the invisible majesty of God.’ sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

The pursuit of the disagreeable is justified in so far as it is a form of asceticism. It must not, however, be carried to the point of becoming a cult of ugliness, for that would amount to a denial of one aspect of truth. This question could hardly arise in a civilization still wholly traditional, for in such a civilization ugliness is more or less accidental. Only in the MODERN world has ugliness become something like a norm or a principle; only here does beauty appear as a speciality, not to say a luxury. Hence the frequent confusion, at all levels, between ugliness and simplicity. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Few prejudices are so contradictory and so sterile as the mania for absolute originality, the ambition of an artistic creation seeking to start from zero, as though man also could create ex nihilo. If the attempt is made, what it ends in is the sub-human aberrations of surrealism. It is the case of Lucifer who, while falling, sees his splendour transformed into horror. Artists want to inflict on us types of originality that are wholly improbable, as though they, who are like ourselves and are our contemporaries, could have the right to such excessive singularities. Had they been ancient Atlanteans or beings from another planet we might in principle believe them, but since they are men of MODERN culture we know them for what they are and we know that their originality can only be an affectation and a false philosophy. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Poetry should express with sincerity a beauty of the soul; one might also say: “with beauty, sincerity”. It would serve no purpose to make so obvious a point but for the fact that in our days definitions of art have become increasingly falsified, either through the abuse of attributing to one art the characteristics of another, or by introducing into a definition of one art, or of all art, perfectly arbitrary elements such as a PRE-occupation with its date; as though the value or lack of value of a work of art could depend on the knowledge of whether it is MODERN or ancient, or on one s believing it to be ancient if it is MODERN or vice versa. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

The MODERN cult of work is founded on the one hand on the fact that work is a necessity for the majority of men, and on the other hand on the human tendency to make a virtue of an unavoidable constraint. The Bible, however, presents work as a sort of punishment: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”; prior to the original sin and the Fall, the first human pair knew no work. sophiaperennis: THE SPIRITUAL MEANING OF WORK

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. sophiaperennis: Science and religious Faith

…let us return for a moment to the MODERN scientific outlook, since it plays so decisive a part in the MODERN mentality. There seems to be absolutely no reason for going into raptures about space-flights; the saints in their ecstasies climb infinitely higher, and these words are used in no allegorical sense, but in a perfectly concrete sense that could be called “scientific” or “exact”. In vain does MODERN science explore the infinitely distant and the infinitely small; it can reach in its own way the world of galaxies and that of molecules, but it is unaware — since it believes neither in Revelation nor in pure intellection — of all the immaterial and supra-sensorial worlds that as it were envelop our sensorial dimensions, and in relation to which these dimensions are no more than a sort of fragile coagulation, destined to disappear when its time comes before the blinding power of the Divine Reality. To postulate a science without metaphysic is a flagrant contradiction, for without metaphysic there can be no standards and no criteria, no intelligence able to penetrate, contemplate and coordinate. Both a relativistic psychologism which ignores the absolute, and also evolutionism which is absurd because contradictory (since the greater cannot come from the less) can be explained only by this exclusion of what is essential and total in intelligence. (Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 130). sophiaperennis: Modern science, and the infinitely distant and the infinitely small

There is close relationship between rationalism and MODERN science; the latter is at fault not in concerning itself solely with the finite, but in seeking to reduce the Infinite to the finite, and consequently in taking no account of Revelation, an attitude which is, strictly speaking, inhuman; our quarrel with MODERN science is that it is inhuman, or infra-human, and not that it is ignorant of the facts which it studies, even though through prejudice it ignores certain of their modalities… (Stations of Wisdom, p. 37). sophiaperennis: Science and intelligence

A striking feature of MODERN science is the disproportion between the scientific, mathematical, practical intelligence and intelligence as such: a scientist 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. What we have called the ‘inhuman’ character of MODERN science also appears in the monstrous fruits it produces, such as the overpopulation of the globe, the degeneration of humankind, and, by compensation, the means of mass destruction. (Stations of Wisdom, p. 38-39). sophiaperennis: Science and intelligence

It will doubtless be objected that MODERN psychology, for its part, is not a science riveted to matter, but this plea fails to take note of the merely empirical character of that science: it is a system of observations and hypotheses, compromised in advance by the fact that those who practice it are ignorant of the profound nature of the phenomena they set out to study. sophiaperennis: Limits of MODERN science

A science, to truly deserve that name, owes us an explanation of a certain order of phenomena; now MODERN science, which claims to be all-embracing by the very fact that it recognizes nothing outside itself as valid, is unable to explain to us, for instance, what a sacred book is, or a saint or a miracle; it knows nothing of God, of the hereafter or the Intellect and it cannot even tell us anything about phenomena such as premonition or telepathy; it does not know in virtue of what principle or possibility shamanistic procedures may cure illnesses or attract rain. (NA: There is a singular irony in the indignation of those who consider that belief in sorcerers and ghosts is incompatible with the science of the “atomic age”, whereas this age is precisely – and utterly — ignorant of what said “beliefs” mean. Only what can be verified “with laboratory clarity” is held to be true, as if it were logical and objective to demand, in the name of truth, conditions which may be contrary to the nature of things, and as if it were a proof of imagination to deny the very possibility of such incompatibilities.) (Treasures of Buddhism, p. 43). sophiaperennis: Limits of MODERN science

All its attempts at explanations regarding things of this order are vitiated basically through a defect of imagination: all things are viewed in function firstly, of empirical “matter” – even if called by some other name and secondly, of the evolutionist hypothesis, instead of primary consideration being given to the principial and “descending” emanation of “ideas” and the progressive coagulation of substances, (NA: Where the perennial philosophy says “Principle, emanation substance” MODERN science will say “energy, matter, evolution.” …) in conformity with the principle of individuation on the one hand and of demiurgic “solidification” on the other. One tries to explain “horizontally” that which is explainable only “in a vertical sense”; it is as though we were living in a glacial world where water was unknown and where only the Revelations mentioned it, whereas profane science would deny its existence. Such a science is assuredly cut to the measure of MODERN man who conceived it and who is at the same time its product; like him, it implicitly claims a sort of immunity or “extraterritoriality” in the face of the Absolute; and like him, this science finds itself cut off from any cosmic or eschatological context.(Treasures of Buddhism, p. 43-44. sophiaperennis: Limits of MODERN science

Science claims to be characterized by its refusal of all purely speculative premisses (the voraussetzungsloses Denken of the German philosophers) and at the same time by a complete liberty of investigation; but this is an illusion since MODERN science, like every other science before it moreover, cannot avoid starting out in its turn from an idea: this initial idea is the dogma concerning the exclusively rational nature of the intelligence and its more or less universal diffusion. In other words, it is assumed that there exists a unique and polyvalent intelligence (which in principle is true) and that this intelligence is possessed by everybody and furthermore that this is what allows investigation to be entirely “free” (which is radically false). sophiaperennis: Science and mythologies

Science and MODERN workers sophiaperennis: Science and mythologies

How is the position or quality of the MODERN industrial worker to be defined? In the first place the answer is that the world of the workers is a wholly artificial creation due to machines and the popular diffusion of scientific information connected with their use; in other words machines infallibly create the artificial human type called ‘proletarian’, or rather they create a proletariat, for here it is essentially a question of a quantitative collectivity and not of a natural caste, a caste, that is based on a particular individual nature. sophiaperennis: Science and mythologies

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 in that 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. (NA: 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.) (Roots of the Human Condition, p. 15). sophiaperennis: Prometheism of MODERN science

There is a close relationship between rationalism and MODERN science; the latter is at fault not in concerning itself solely with the finite, but in seeking to reduce the Infinite to the finite, and consequently in taking no account of Revelation, an attitude which is, strictly speaking, inhuman; what we reproach MODERN science for is that it is inhuman – or infra-human – and not that it has no knowledge of the facts which it studies, even though it deliberately ignores certain of their modalities. It believes that it is possible to approach total knowledge of the world – which after all is indefinite – by what can only be a finite series of discoveries, as if it were possible to exhaust the inexhaustible. sophiaperennis: Science and rationalism

If it is MODERN science which has created the abnormal and deceiving conditions which afflict youth today, that is because this science is itself abnormal and deceiving. No doubt it will be said that man is not responsible for his nihilism, that it is science which has slain the gods, but this is an avowal of intellectual impotence, not a title of glory, since anyone of who knows what the gods signify will not let himself be carried away by discoveries in the physical realm – which merely displace sensory symbols, but do not abolish them – and still less by gratuitous hypotheses and the errors of psychologists. Even if we know that space is an eternal night sheltering galaxies and nebulae, the sky will still stretch blue above us and symbolize the realm of angels and of Bliss. (Understanding Islam, p. 112). sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

Imagine a radiant summer sky and imagine simple folk who gaze at it projecting into it their dream of the beyond; now suppose that it were possible to transport these simple folk into the dark and freezing abyss of the galaxies and nebulae with its overwhelming silence. In this abyss all too many of them would lose their faith, and this is precisely what happens as a result of MODERN science both to the learned and to the victims of popularization. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

Nevertheless, the very precision of MODERN science, or of certain of its branches, has become seriously threatened, and from a wholly unforeseen direction, by the intrusion of psychoanalysis, not to mention that of “surrealism” and other systematizations of the irrational; or again by the intrusion of existentialism, which indeed belongs strictly speaking not so much to the domain of the irrational as to that of the unintelligent. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

It is not surprising that a science arising out of the fall — or one of the falls– and out of an illusory rediscovery of the sensory world should also be a science of nothing but the sensory (NA: This distinction is necessary to meet the objection that science operates with elements inaccessible to our senses.), or what is virtually sensory, and that it should deny everything which surpasses that domain, thereby denying God, the next world and the soul (NA: Not all scientists deny these realities, but science denies them, and that is quite a different thing.), and this presupposes a denial of the pure Intellect, which alone is capable of knowing everything that MODERN science rejects. For the same reasons it also denies Revelation, which alone rebuilds the bridge broken by the fall. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

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 opinions 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. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

… it is normal for humanity to live in a symbol, which is a pointer towards heaven, an opening towards the Infinite. As for modem science it has pierced the protecting frontiers of this symbol and by so doing destroyed the symbol itself; it has thus abolished this pointer, this opening, even as the modem world in general breaks through the space-symbols constituted by traditional civilizations; what it terms ‘stagnation’ and ‘sterility’ is really the homogeneity and continuity of the symbol. (NA: Neither India nor the Pythagoreans practiced MODERN science, and to isolate where they are concerned the elements of rational technique reminiscent of our science from the metaphysical elements which bear no resemblance to it is an arbitrary and violent operation contrary to real objectivity. When Plato is decanted in this way he retains no more than an anecdotal interest, whereas his whole doctrine aims at installing man in the supra-temporal and supradiscursive life of thought of which both mathematics and the sensory world can be symbols. If, then, peoples have been able to do without our autonomous science for thousands of years and in every climate, it is because this science is not necessary; if it has appeared as a phenomenon of civilization suddenly and in a single place, that is to show its essentially contingent nature.’ (Fernand Brunner: Science et Réalité, Paris, 1954-)) (Understanding Islam, p. 30-31). sophiaperennis: Science and Tradition

It is not surprising that a science arising out of the fall – or one of the falls – and out of an illusory rediscovery of the sensory world should also be a science of nothing but the sensory, or what is virtually sensory, (NA: This distinction is necessary to meet the objection that science operates with elements inaccessible to our senses) and that it should deny everything which surpasses that domain, thereby denying God, the next world and the soul, (NA: Not all scientists deny these realities, but science denies them, and that is quite a different thing.) and this presupposes a denial of the pure Intellect, which alone is capable of knowing everything that MODERN science rejects. sophiaperennis: Science and negation of Transcendence

We do not reproach MODERN science for being a fragmentary, analytical science, lacking in speculative, metaphysical and cosmological elements or for arising from the residues or debris of ancient sciences; we reproach it for being subjectively and objectively a transgression and for leading subjectively and objectively to disequilibrium and so to disaster. (Esoterism as Principle and as Way, p 192). sophiaperennis: Science and transgression

Modern science could not have developed except as the result of a forgetting of God, and of our duties towards God and towards ourselves; in an analogous manner, artistic naturalism, which first made its appearance in antiquity and was rediscovered at the beginnings of the MODERN era, can be explained only by the explosive birth of a passionately exteriorized and exteriorizing mentality. (Esoterism as Principle and as Way, p 193). sophiaperennis: Science and transgression

Science is supposed to inform us not only about what is in space but also what is in time. As for the first-named category of knowledge, no one denies that Western science has accumulated an enormous quantity of observations, but as for the second category, which ought to reveal us what the abysses of duration hold, science is more ignorant than any Siberian shaman, who can at least relate his ideas to a mythology, and thus to an adequate symbolism. There is of course a gap between the physical knowledge — necessarily restricted — of a primitive hunter and that of a MODERN physicist; but measured against the extent of knowable things, that gap is a mere millimeter. sophiaperennis: Sciences and precision

Nevertheless, the very precision of MODERN science, or of certain of its branches, has become seriously threatened, and from a wholly unforeseen direction, by the intrusion of psychoanalysis, not to mention that of “surrealism” and other systematizations of the irrational; or again by the intrusion of existentialism, which indeed belongs strictly speaking not so much to the domain of the irrational as to that of the unintelligent. A rationality that claims self-sufficiency cannot fail to provoke such interferences, at any rate at its vulnerable points such as psychology or the psychological — or “psychologizing” — interpretation of phenomena which are by definition beyond its reach. (Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 36) sophiaperennis: Sciences and precision

That spiritual function which can be described as “action of presence” found in the Maharshi its most rigorous expression. Shri Ramana was as it were the incarnation, in these latter days and in the face of the MODERN activist fever, of what is primordial and incorruptible in India. He manifested the nobility of contemplative non-action in the face of an ethic of utilitarian agitation, and he showed the implacable beauty of pure truth in the face of passions, weaknesses and betrayals. sophiaperennis: Ramana Maharshi

… some MODERN Vedantists … claim that the two states in question (the waking and the dreaming egos) are quite unrelated, that the dreaming ego is not in any way the same as the waking one, that the two states are closed systems and that it is incorrect to take the waking ego as the point of reference for the dreaming consciousness; (NA: Like Kant, Siddheswarananda, for instance, seems to think that his own experiences limit those of others.) and that consequently, the latter is in no way inferior to the former nor less real (NA: Some have even gone as far as to claim that dreaming is superior to the waking state since it comprises possibilities which are excluded by the physical world, as though these possibilities were anything but purely passive and as though the objective and determinant reality of the waking state did not compensate infinitely for the dream possibility of rising into the air; or again, as if one could not just as well dream of being deprived of movement.). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

… the MODERN ‘spirituality’ of India, whether it bases itself on bhakti or jnâna or both at once — not to mention those who think they can do better than the sages of old — this ‘spirituality’, we say, is characterized, not only by a too unilateral confidence in such or such ‘means’, but also and above all by the fact of neglecting, with remarkable lack of consciousness, the human foundations — the ‘human climate’ it might be said — the integrity of which is guaranteed only by tradition and by the sacred. Spiritual ‘short cuts’ exist, certainly, and cannot but exist, since they are possible; but, being founded on pure intellection on the one hand and on subtle and rigorous technique on the other, and on bringing into play both the constitution of the microcosm and universal analogies, such short cuts exact an intellectual preparation and a psychological conditioning anchored in the tradition, apart from which they remain ineffective, or still worse lead in the opposite direction. This is the sin committed by the protagonists of such and such a yoga who believe that they must offer to the least apt and the least informed people a ‘purely scientific’ and ‘nonsectarian’ ‘way’, ‘discovered’ by ancient sages but ‘freed from all superstition’ and all ‘scholasticism’, that is to say, in short, freed from all traditional safeguards and indeed from every adequate reason for existing. (Gnosis Divine Wisdom, p. 60-61). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

In order to understand certain error of neo-bhaktism, or of neo-Hinduism in general, it is necessary to recall that unfortunately the opposition between ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’ does not always coincide with the opposition between ‘piety’ and ‘worldliness’; this paradox is a favorite haunt of Satan, for there he finds a fruitful ground for all sorts of seductions and hypocrisies; it amounts, in short, to dishonest speculation on the difference of plane separating doctrinal truth from virtue. Nothing is more agreeable to the Evil One than the cries of indignation of the heretic against the occasional vice of the orthodox, or the pharisaical condemnation, by some orthodox-minded person, of a spiritual value not properly understood; the genesis of the MODERN West and the easy and rapid MODERNization of the East are largely to be explained in terms of these inseparable oscillations.(Gnosis Divine Wisdom, p. 64) sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

As for the first of these notions (occultism), it may be pointed out that the word “occult” has its origin in the vires occultae, the unseen forces of nature, and in the occulta, the secrets relating to the ancient mysteries; in fact, however, MODERN occultism is by and large more than the study of extrasensory phenomena, one of the most hazardous of pursuits by reason of its wholly empirical character and its lack of any doctrinal basis. Occultism ranges from pure and simple experiment to pseudoreligious speculations and practices; it is only one step further to describe all authentically esoteric doctrines and methods as “occultism”, and this step has been taken either through ignorance, indifference, or carelessness, and without shame or scruple, by those who have an interest to serve by this kind of depreciation. It is as though one were to describe genuine mystics as occultists on the grounds that they too were concern with the unseen. (Logic and Transcendence, p.1). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

In a quite general way, that which calls for suspicion and for implacable vigilance is the reducing of the spiritual to the psychic, a practice which by now has become a commonplace to the point of characterizing Western interpretations of the traditional doctrines. This so-called ‘psychology of spirituality’ or this ‘psychoanalysis of the sacred’ is the breach through which the mortal poison of MODERN relativism infiltrates into the still living Oriental traditions. According to Jung the figurative emergence of certain contents of the ‘collective unconscious’ is accompanied empirically, as its psychic complement, by a noumenal sensation of eternity and infinitude. This is the way to ruin insidiously all transcendence and all intellection, for, according to this theory, it is the collective unconscious, or subconscious, which is at the origin of ‘individuated’ consciousness, human intelligence having two components, namely the reflection of the subconscious on the one hand and the experience of the external world on the other ; but since experience is not in itself intelligence, on this showing intelligence will have the subconscious for its substance, so that one has to try and define the subconscious on the basis of its own ramification. This is the classical contradiction of all subjectivist and relativist philosophy. (The Essentials Writings of Frithjof Schuon, p. 219) sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

The mentality of today seeks in fact to reduce everything to categories connected with time … and this is entirely in conformity with MODERN relativism, and with a psychologist or biologist that destroys essential values. In order to “situate” the doctrine of a scholastic, for example, or even of a Prophet, a “psychoanalysis” is prepared — it is needless to emphasize the monstrous impudence implicit in such an attitude — and with wholly mechanical and perfectly unreal logic the “influences” to which this doctrine has been subject are laid bare. There is no hesitation in attributing to saints, in the course of this process, all kinds of artificial and even fraudulent, conduct ; but it is obviously forgotten, with satanic inconsequence, to apply the same principle to oneself, and to explain one’s own supposedly “objective” position by psychoanalytical considerations ; sages are treated as being sick men and one takes oneself for a god. (Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 32). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

A most striking feature of the North American branch of the Primordial Sanatana Dharma is the doctrine of the four years: the sacred animal of the Plains-Indians, the buffalo, symbolizes the Mahayuga, each of its legs representing a Yuga. At the beginning of this Mahayuga a buffalo was placed by the Great Spirit at the West in order to hold back the water which menace the earth. Every year this bison loses a hear, and in very Yuga it loses a foot. When it will have lost all its hair, and its feet, the water will overwhelm the earth and the Mahayuga will be finished. the analogy with the bull of Dharma in Hinduism is very remarkable; at every Yuga, this bill withdraws a foot, and spirituality loses its strength; and now we are near the end of the kali-yuga. Like the orthodox Hindus, the traditional Red Indians have this conviction, which is obviously true in spite of all the mundane optimism of the MODERN world; but let us add that the compensation of our very dark age is the Mercy of the Holy Name, as it is emphasized in the Maneuver Dharma Shasta and the Trimmed Bhagavata and other holy scriptures. sophiaperennis: His Holiness and the Red Indian