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The Mystery of the Two Natures

by

Frithjof Schuon

Source: Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 8, No. 2. (Spring, 1974). World Wisdom, Inc.www.studiesincomparativereligion.com

Editor's note: The following is from an updated translationof the essay, approved by the estate of Frithjof Schuon.

It is a strange fact in the history of Christianity that Pope Honorius I, though an impeccable pontiff, wasexpelled from the Church by the Sixth Ecumenical Council for the sole reason of having hesitatedconcerning the question of the two wills of Christ. A century and a half after this popes death, the SeventhEcumenical Council considered it useful or necessary to ratify the excommunication of Honorius I and toinclude his name in the anathema of all known heresies.

This ostracism is logically surprising when one is aware of the complexity of the issue at stake. For some,Christ has two wills since he is true man and true God; for others, these two wills are but one sinceasHonorius himself saidChrists human will cannot operate in contradiction to his divine will. One couldsay grosso modo that Christ possesses two wills in principle and one in fact; or again, one could use theimage of two overlapping circles and express oneself thus: if it goes without saying that Christ possesses a

prioritwo distinct wills, given his two incommensurable natures, there nonetheless is a region in his personwhere the two wills blend, as is seen precisely in the geometric symbolism of two intersecting circles.

What can be said concerning the two wills applies above all and with all the more reason to the two natures:if it is true that Christ is at the same time both man and God, two things are then incontrovertible, namely,the duality and the unity of his nature. We are not saying that the monophysites, who admit only the unity ofChrists nature, are right as against the Orthodox and Catholics, but neither do we say that they areintrinsically wrong from their point of view; and the same holds, as a result, for the monothelites, who simplyapply the monophysite principle to a particular aspect of the nature of the God-Man. The justification of themonophysites appears, quite paradoxically, in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: it seems to us thatit would be appropriate to apply to the Eucharistic elements what is affirmed dogmatically of Christ, namely,that he is true man and true God; if this is so, one could equally admit that the Eucharist is true bread andtrue Body or true wine and true Blood without compromising its divinity. To say that the bread is but anappearance is to apply to the Eucharist the doctrinejudged hereticalof the monophysites, for whomChrist is, precisely, only apparently a man since he is really God; now just as the quality of true man inCatholic and Orthodox doctrine does not preclude Christ from being true God, so should the quality of true

bread not preclude the host from being true Body in the minds of theol ogians, all the more so as boththingsthe created and the Uncreatedare incommensurable, which means that the physical reality of theelements does not exclude their divine content, any more than the real corporeality of Christ prevents thepresence of the divine nature.

It must be said again that monophysitism and therefore also transubstantiationism are not intrinsicallywrongthe opposite would in fact be astonishingand for the following reason: to acknowledge thatChrists humanity is a vehicle of the divine nature amounts to saying that if, in one respect, the human sideis really human, it is so in a way that is nonetheless different from the humanity of ordinary men; the divinePresence transfigures or transubstantiates in a certain way, and a priori, the human nature; Christs body is

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already here below what heavenly bodies are, with the sole difference that it is nevertheless affected bysome of the accidents of earthly life. The same is true for the Eucharist: if in one respect it is real breadand real wine, in anotherwhich does not abolish the firstit is in fact substantially more than ordinarymatter; metaphysically, this does not oblige one to pretend that this matter is only an appearance, buttheologically, from the point of view of uni-dimensionalwe might say planimetricalternatives, thenegation of real matter is probably the only means for a certain mentality of affirming effectively andenduringly the transcendence of the Eucharist. Nonetheless, this doctrine is bound to be a two-edged

sword, the dangers of which can be neutralized only by esoteric truth, or theosophy in the ancient and truesense of the word.

Theologians seem to think that bread and wine, as natural substances, are unworthy of the divine Presence,and this sentiment brings to mind a thesis of Saint Gregory of Nyssa, which is not irrelevant here.Hellenists[1]deemed the Incarnation to be unworthy of God owing to the frailty and impurity of earthlybodies; in his Great Catechesis, Saint Gregory answers that sin alone, not fleshly materiality, is unworthyof God. The Greeks might have responded that corporeal miseries, being traces of original sin and the fall,partake in the indignity of sin and unquestionably manifest it; and the Bishop of Nyssa could have retortedthat a proof of the compatibility between the human body and a divine inherence is provided by theinherence of the Intellect, which is of a heavenly order and whose transcendence the Greeks are the first toacknowledge. The decisive argument is that these two orders, the created and the Uncreated, share nocommon measure and that nothing that is merely naturalwhatever its distant cause may becan opposeitself to the Presence of God.

* * *

The uninformed reader who finds in the Koran that Jesus was one of those brought nigh (muqarrabn) andone of the righteous (slihn)Srah of The Family of Imran: 45, 46has the following reaction: thatChrist is one of those brought nigh is evident from every point of view, for if the greatest Prophets are notclose to God, who then could be? And that Christ was one of the righteous is evident a fortioriand byseveral orders of magnitude, mathematically speaking. In reality, both seeming pleonasms are merelyellipses meant to illustrate a doctrinal position directed against the Christian thesis of the twofold nature ofChrist; generally speaking, when the Koran appears to make statements that are all too obvious, anddisappointing in their context, it is engaging in implicit polemics; in other words, it is aiming at a particularopinion, which it does not enunciate and which needs to be known in order for one to understand thepassage. What Islam intends to affirm, in its way and according to its perspective, is that Jesus is true manand true God: instead of saying man, the Koran says righteous so as to define immediately the nature of

this man; and since its intention is to specify that no man is God, it suggests what in Christian terms is calledthe divine nature of Christ by using the expression brought nigh, which denotes the most elevated stationIslam can attribute to a human being.

Be that as it may, the twofold nature of Christ is sufficiently specified in the following verse: Jesus theMessiah, son of Mary, is the Messenger of God and His Word, which He [God] placed in Mary, and [Jesusis] of His Spirit [the Spirit of God] (Srahof Women: 171). In admitting the Immaculate Conception and theVirgin Birth, Islam accepts in its way the divine nature of Jesus:[2]in its way, that is, with the obviousreservation that it always intends to dissociate the divine from the human, and therefore that the Christicphenomenon is for it no more than a particular marvel of Omnipotence.

* * *

We have said above that the ostracism by the two Councils of Honorius I in particular and of themonophysites-monothelites in general is logically surprising; now to say logically is to imply a reservation,for it is no surprise from an exoteric point of view that a too fragmentary or in some respects inopportuneformulation should be considered a crime;[3]this shows that one is dealing with a domain that must bedistinguished from that of pure, hence disinterested, knowledge, which admits the interplay of aspects andpoints of view without ever getting locked in artificial or inflammatory alternatives. It is important, however,not to confuse theological elaborations, which are fluid and productive of scissions, with dogmasthemselves, which are fixed; such elaborationsthough also providential on their leveltake on theappearance of dogmatic systems in their turn, but far more contingently so than those within which they aresituated as modalities; these are minorupyas, if one will, that is, saving mirages or spiritual means,designed to render more accessible that majorupya which is religion. Now it is essential to keep in mind

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the idea of lesser truth or relative error contained in this Buddhist notion; it means that there is, on thepart of Heaven, tolerance through Mercy and not complete approbation. For man is a form, and he needsforms; but since he alsoand even above allneeds the Essence, which religion or wisdom is supposed tocommunicate to him, he really needs a form of the Essence or a manifestation of the Void (shnyamrti).If in one respect form is a prolongation of Essence, in another it contradicts it, which accounts on the onehand for the ambiguity of the exoteric upya, and on the other hand for two aspects of esoterism, one ofwhich extends and intensifies the dogmatic upya, whereas the other is independent of it to the point of

being able to contradict it. To the objection that esoterism also belongs to the formal order, one mustrespond that esoterism is aware of this and that it tends to transcend the accidentality of its own form,whereas exoterism is totally and heavily identified with its form.

What results from this, in an altogether self-evident way, is that the dividing line between orthodoxy andapparent, and therefore merely extrinsic, heresy depends on psychological or moral contingencies of anethnic or cultural provenance; while the fundamental upya, quite clearly, transmits total truth through itssymbolism, the same cannot be said of that minorupya which is theology; its relativitywith respect tototal truthis moreover proven, in the Christian sphere, by the notion of theological progress, whichcontains an admission at once candid and appalling.[4]It is true that every theology can lead incidentally tothe profoundest insights, but it cannot, in its general and official doctrine, draw the conclusions such insightsentail.

It is a radical error to believe that the greatest spokesmen of theology, even if they are canonized saints,

hold ipso facto all the keys to supreme wisdom;[5]they are instruments of Providence and are not calledupon to go beyond certain limits; on the contrary, their role is to formulate what these limits are, according toa perspective willed directly or indirectly by Heaven. By indirectly we mean those cases where Heaventolerates a limitation requiredor made desirableby a particular human predisposition, perhaps not well-defined a priori, but nonetheless proving to be predominant; this explains the majority of the differences ordivergencesin most cases unilateral[6]between the Western and Eastern Churches. Some of thesedifferentiations may seem a gratuitous luxury, but they are nonetheless unavoidable and finally opportune,collective mentalities being what they are. Even so, this opportuneness has nothing absolute about it andcannot prevent a kind of poison, concealed in this or that theological particularism, from manifesting itself inthe course of history, belatedly and upon contact with false ideas whose possibility theologians were unableto foresee.

In considering the most general factors of the issue, we shall say that Semitic dogmatisms, as well asHindu darshanas like Ramanujan Vishnuism, pertain to the chivalrous and heroic spirit,[7]which necessarily

tends toward voluntarism and individualism, and thus toward a moralizing anthropomorphism. It is in view ofsuch a temperament, and because of it, that exclusivist[8]dogmas are crystallized and their correspondingtheologies elaborated, which clearly implies that this temperament or this manner of seeing and feeling isacceptable to God as the raw material of theupya; nonetheless, since each religion is by definition atotalityas is proven by its imperative and unconditional characterand since God could never imposeabsolute limits, the religious phenomenon by definition comprises the esoteric phenomenon, which istransmitted in principle and as a matter of preference, in different degrees, by vocations that favorcontemplation, including sacred art.

A certain underlying warrior or knightly mentality[9]accounts for many theological oscillations and theirensuing disputesthe nature of Christ and the structure of the Trinity having been the notable questions atissue in the Christian worldjust as it accounts for such forms of narrow-mindedness as theincomprehension and intolerance of ancient theologians toward the metaphysics and mysteries ofHellenism. It is moreover this same mentality that produced the divergence, in the very heart of the

Greek tradition, between Aristotle and Plato, Plato having personified in essence the brahmna spiritinherent in the Orphic and Pythagorean tradition,[10]whereas the Stagirite formulated a metaphysics thatwas in certain respects centrifugal and perilously open to the world of phenomena, actions, experiences,and adventures.[11]

After this parenthesis, which the general context of the case of Honorius I permits or even demands, let usreturn to our doctrinal subject.

* * *

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The problem of the two natures of Christ can be reduced, in the last analysis, to the relationship between therelative and the Absolute: if Christ is the Absolute entered into relativity, it follows, not only that the relativeshould return thereby to absoluteness, but also and above all that the relative should be prefigured in the

Absolute; this is the meaning of the uncreated Word, which manifests itself in the human order, not only inthe form of Christ or theAvatra, but also and a prioriin the form of the immanent Intellect, and this bringsus back to the complementarity between Revelation and Intellection. The Absolute manifested in the humanworld is at once Truth and Presence, or one or the other of these two elements, but without being able to

exclude its complement. The element Presence takes precedence in Christianity, hence the sacramentsand the emphasis on the volitive aspect of man; in other climates, and above all in universal gnosis, whichretains its rights everywhere, it is the element Truth that determines the means of the path, in diverse waysand on diverse levels.

In order to be as clear as possible, it is necessary to insist on the following principle: there is no possiblerelationship between the Absolute as such and relativity; for such a relationship to exist there must besomething relative in the Absolute and something absolute in the relative. In other words: if one admits thatthe world is distinct from God, one must also admit that this distinction is prefigured in God Himself, whichmeans that His unity of Essencewhich is never in questioncomprises degrees; not to admit thispolarization in divinis is to leave the existence of the world without a cause, or it is to admit that there are twodistinct realities and thus two Gods, namely, God and the world. For one of two things: either the world isexplained starting from God, in which case there is in God prefiguration and creative act, and thus relativity;or else there is in God no relativity, in which case the world is unexplainable and is placed on a level with

God. We once again emphasize that divine Relativity, the cause of the world, fulfills the role of the Absolutein relation to the world; in this sense, theologians are right to uphold in certain cases the absoluteness of allthat is divine; absoluteness, for them, is thus synonymous with Divinity.

At the risk of repeating ourselves, we could express this as follows: whoever admits the presence of theAbsolute in the world, in the form of Christ for example, must admit equally the presence of the relative inGodin the form of the Word, precisely; whoever denies that there can be any relativity in God mustconsider the Creator, the Revealer, or the Redeemer as being situated beneath God, in the manner of thedemiurge; for the Absolute as such neither creates, nor reveals, nor saves. In refusing to admit the relativityof thehypostases, there is an element of confusion between the absolute and the sublime: since the Divinitydeserves or demands worship, there are some who want the Divinity to be absolutely absolute in everypossible respect, if we may express ourselves, provisionally and incidentally, in such a manner. Now God isdeserving of the worship oflatria, not inasmuch as He comprises no relativityfor in this respect He ishumanly inaccessiblebut inasmuch as He is absolute with respect to the relativity of the world, whilecomprising an aspect of relativity in view of this very contact.

One might object that the thesis of reciprocity between the Absolute and the relative does not take intoaccount the incommensurability, and hence the asymmetry, between the two terms; this is both true andfalse. If one wished to place emphasis on the incommensurable nature of God, one could not do so simplyby denying relativity within the divine Principle; one could do so adequately only by separating the creativePrinciple from the intrinsic Absolute, which takes us back to the alternative between Paramtma and My,and then to the absorption of the second term by the first, precisely as a result of their incommensurability.This reduction of the real to the One without a second is exactly what those who deny relativity in divinis donot want, all the more as they hold fiercely to the unconditional and in some way massive reality of theworld; in wanting an absolutely absolute God situated above an unconditionally real world, they seek tokeep both feet on the ground without sacrificing anything of transcendence. In reality, however, theUniverse is no more than an inward and, as it were, dreamlike dimension of God: it reflects the divinequalities in a mode that entails contrast, movement, and privation, thereby realizing the possibility for God tobe other than God, a possibility contained in the divine Infinitude itself.

NOTES

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[1]We are referring here to the partisans of Hellenism, that is to say, of the Hellenist tradition, which wecannot term pagan since we are envisaging it with respect to its spiritual values, though the wordHellenist more often designates, on the one hand, the Hellenized Jews of anti quity and, on the other,scholars versed in Greek language and literature.

[2]According to a hadth, Jesus and Mary were the only human beings the devil did not touch at birth withhis claw, and who therefore did not utter a cry.

[3]Let it be said in passing that the anathematization of Honorius I proves, moreover, not that he washeretical, but that he was considered as such and that, as a result, the Church admits that a pope can lapseinto heresyexcept, of course, when promulgating a dogmatic or moral definition ex cathedra; one mightreject this by proposing that Honorius I did no more than sin against discipline; but in that case, theanathemas heaped upon him canonically would be inexplicable. Be that as it may, there is nothing inprinciple to prevent a pope from ruining the Church without in the least having to make an excathedra pronouncement; the greatest theologians admit the possibility of a pope lapsing into heresy, andthe whole problem for them then becomes whether the heretical pope is deposed ipso facto or must bedeposed canonically. However, the possibility at issue hereof which Honorius I is not at all an example can occur in so severe a degree only under utterly abnormal circumstances, which the twentieth century infact affords; there would still be the question whether the pope who might be incriminated was a legitimatepope with regard to the conditions of his election.

[4]One of two things: either there is theological progress, in which case theology is of little importance;or theology is important, in which case there can be no theological progress.

[5]Thus the wisdom of the saints, which some seek to set in opposition to metaphysics, is but an abuse oflanguage; the wisdom of Ecclesiasticus is not, after all, of the same order as that of the Upanishads. Itshould be noted in this connection that if the Semitic Scriptures, even the most fundamental, do not have thetenor of the Vednta, this is because, unlike the Vednta, they are not directed exclusively to an intellectualelite, but have a function that obliges them to take account of possibilities found in the collective soul and toforestall the most diverse of reactions. To this it must be added that a sacred book, like the Gospel forexample, which seems to speak to sinners, at least at the outset, really addresses any man insofar as hesins; this confers upon the notion of sin the widest significance possiblethat of a centrifugal motion,whether compressive or dispersingeven when there is properly speaking no objective transgression.Sacred language, even if directed at first to specific men, is finally directed to man as such.

[6]For the spirit of innovation is to be found with the Latins, a fact resulting moreover from the paradoxicalcoincidence between prophetism and caesarism in the papacy.

[7]The fact that Ramanuja was a brahman and not a kshatriya is no grounds for objection, since all castesinasmuch as they are particular predispositionsare reflected or repeated in each single caste, so thata brahman of a kshatriya type is individually equivalent to a kshatriya of a brahman type. Furthermore, everyhuman collectivity produces a human type with no affinity for speculative thought; it is all the moreparadoxical and significant that this is the type or mentalitywhich a Hindu would call a shdra outlookthat determines all the so-called newtheology and constitutes its sole originality and sole mystery.

[8]Such an adjective is not a pleonasm, for a metaphysical axiom itself can also have a dogmatic character,practically speaking, but without therefore having to exclude formulations diverging from it. On the other

hand, there are metaphysical axioms whose conditional character is recognized a priori, depending on thedegree of relativity of the idea expressed: hence, archetypes contained in the creative Intellect are more realthan their cosmic manifestation while being illusory with respect to the divine Essence; such and such HinduDivinities are dogmatically inviolable, but they vanish before Paramtm or, rather, are reabsorbed therein,so that it may be possible to deny without heresy their existence, provided of course that by the same tokenone deny all beings that are even more relative.

[9]One cannot lose sight of the fact that, in all climates, the same causes produce the same effects inhighly diverse proportionsand that India is no exception; the quarrels of sectarian Vishnuism are a case inpoint.

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[10]It goes without saying that the classical periodwith its grave intellectual and artistic deviationand itsrecurrence at the time of the Renaissance are patent examples of warrior or knightly, and hence kshatriya,Luciferianism; however, we do not have in mind here deviations as such since, on the contrary, we arespeaking of normal manifestations, which are acceptable to Heaven; otherwise there could be no question ofvoluntarist and emotional upyas.

[11]But let us not make Aristotelianism responsible for the modern world, which is due to a convergence of

various factors, such as the abusesand subsequent reactionsprovoked by the unrealistic idealism ofCatholicism, and also by the diverging and irreconcilable demands of the Latin and Germanic mentalities, allof which lead, precisely, to scientism and the profane mentality.

The Only Heritage We Have

by

Gai Eaton

Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring 1974) World Wisdom, Inc.

www.studiesincomparativereligion.com

THE arrogance of the West in relation to other cultures may be decently cloaked in our time, for this is anage of polite falsities, but it is still obsessive. The fact that non-Europeans are expected to adopt Westernpatterns of Government and Western post-Christian morality (as enshrined in the Charter of the UnitedNations) is sufficient evidence of this. Condemnation of any departure from Western norms of behavior by

Africans, Arabs, or Asians is now expressed more in terms of sorrow than of anger, but it is expressednonetheless and betrays a complacency that has scarcely been dented by two World Wars or by the dimrealization that our history is a quite unparalleled story of destruction and exploitation.

This complacency blocks the way to any appreciation of what has beenand, to some extent, still isthehuman norm elsewhere in the world, outside the environment we have created in the aftermath ofChristianity. And yet, without such understanding, it is quite impossible for the modern world to see itselfobjectively or in context.

Mircea Eliade has suggested that for the past half-century Western scholars have approached the study ofmythology from a completely different viewpoint to that of their nineteenth century predecessors. Unlike theVictorians, for whom the word myth was equivalent to fiction, modern scholarsso he saysaccept themyth in the terms in which it has been understood in the archaic societies, that is to say as a true storytelling us something about the nature of the universe and about mans place in it.

This may be true of certain scholars, but it is very far from being true of the general public or, for that matter,of the television pundits who play such a dominant role in molding public opinion. In this field, as in so manyothers, the intellectual assumptions of ordinary people are still based upon the scientific thinking of the lastcentury; and if reputable scholars have at last abandoned the notion that the great archaic myths are nomore than an inept, pre-scientific attempt to explain the observed phenomena of nature, their views havecertainly not reached the writers of school text-books or penetrated the minds of most educated people in

the Western world.

A superficial study of the life-patterns, myths, and rituals of primitive peoples played a significant part inundermining the religious faith of Christians in the second half of the nineteenth century. First, it was takenfor granted that these other races were lower on the evolutionary scale than Europeans (What, after all,had they invented? Where were their railway trains?). Secondly it was assumed by people who hadcompletely lost the capacity for analogical and symbolical thinking that the myths by which these races livedwere meant to be taken quite literally and represented no more than the first gropings of the rational animaltowards a scientific explanation of the universe. On this basis, since it was impossible to miss the parallels

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between primitive religion and the most advanced of religions, Christianity, the question had to be askedwhether the latter also should not be classified as a pre-scientific effort to account for observed facts.

If these arguments were sound, then either one of two conclusions might be drawn from them. It could beassumed that religion is a phenomenon which evolves in step with human evolution, provided it isconstantly purged of its primitive and unscientific elements and kept up-to-date; or else that religion assuch, including Christianity, is no more than a vestige of the pre-scientific age and should be discarded

together with all the other superstitions that we have inherited from the times of ignorance. Protestant sectsconstantly on the defensive are only too ready to adopt the first of these conclusions in the mistaken notionthat it offers their religion some hope of survival, and we have recently seen the hierarchy of the CatholicChurch stumbling into this very pitfall. They imagine that Christianity might be allowed to survive on amodest scale if it can be proved to be useful to society, that is, to make men better citizens, mo re decentneighbors, more conscientious tax-payers; and they are ready to abandon everything that smacks of other-worldliness, of metaphysics or of ritualism. The more ground they give, the harder they are pressed by theirenemies.

And yet there is only one question that needs to be asked, and the answer to this question cannot dependupon any contingency, let alone upon social or moral considerations. If religion is true, then it would remainno less true even if one could prove that it makes men worse rather than better citizens, more cruel ratherthan kinder. If it is false, then it would be no less false if shown to be capable of transforming this world intoa earthly paradise. Behind and above all human and moral considerations this question stands alone in stark

simplicity and the way in which it is answered is totally decisive.

* * *

There are occasions when poison and antidote are to be found in the same place. Faced with the confusionof perspectives which has been the inevitable result of the breakdown of those human and geographicalbarriers which formerly divided different cultures and different religious domains into so many separateworlds, there is no going back to the simplicity of a single, self-sufficient viewpoint. It becomes essential togo forward to the recognition that perspectives never really clash, their orientation being always towards thesame, unique centre. The knowledge of other doctrines, other ways to the centre, which has done so muchto shake the faith of those who had believed their own truth to be the only one (as, in a sense, it was, sincethey needed no other to attain salvation) must now be used to revitalize all those relative truths which serveas bridges between our present existence and a realm beyond such relativities. One bridge is enough for

any man. But first he must be convinced of its soundness. Under present circumstances this seems todepend upon having some general knowledge of the nature of bridges.

This knowledge can scarcely be effective unless it takes account of what is in fact the specifically humanheritage (and primal material out of which all bridges have been built), the primordial tradition orperennialphilosophy. This is the bedrock of all human awareness of what we are and where we are, and itmight be said that all the doctrines which have served to keep us human through the ages and to enable usto make use of our heritage have been no more than divinely willed adaptations of this basic wisdom to theincreasingly desperate needs of a fallenand still fallinghumanity.

The great acts of renewal, the Revelations from which are descended the world religions as we now knowthem, took place not as milestones on the evolutionary way but as medicines for a worsening sickness. Theyhappened when (and wherever) the archaic wisdom was in so grave a condition of decay that a directintervention from outside the normal context of human existence was required if men were to be saved from

losing all sense of their real nature and destiny. In the case of Hinduism, the acts of renewal did not breakthe continuity of the tradition, but gave it a new impetus. Christianity was able to maintain a close link withthe Judaic tradition (hence the inclusion of the Old Testament in the Christian Bible). And Islam, although itcame into being in what was virtually a spiritual vacuum, has always been perfectly explicit as to its role: theProphet Muhammad was not an innovator, but a reminder of forgotten truths and the restorer of an ancientwisdom, pointing a way of return to the normal and universal religion of mankind and crowning, by hismission, the work of countless prophets and messengers who had maintained the link between God andman since the beginning of time.

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Such interventions and renewals would have been unnecessary if it had been possible then (or now) formen to tap the full resources of the primordial traditions by remounting the stream of time and as thePeople of the Book might saybursting back into the Garden of Eden. But the direction of time is only tooclearly indicated in everything around us, in the running down of clocks, in the ageing and decay of thingsand organisms and in the dissolution of patterns into their component fragments. This direction may betemporarily reversed (since creation is not a closed system) through the inbreak of That which is outsidetime, through Revelation or through the rituals of renewal practiced by many archaic peoples, but the

possibility of returning once and for all to the place from which mankind set out does not exist within ourframe of reference. The lightning stroke seizes upon the wandering fragments and organizes them into apattern through which some quantum of meaning finds expression or some message is flashed upon thescreen of existence. The pattern, however, must eventually be subjected to the normal processes of timeand suffer the common fate of all things under the sun.

This is why we are denied access to the fullness of our heritage and surmise its existence from the bits andpieces, the echoes and the memories which are seen to lie all around us if only we are prepared torecognize them for what they are. These fragments, still to be found in the myths and rituals of the fewprimitive peoples who have not yet been totally submerged in the stream of modernism, are immenselyprecious. They may have been warped by the passage of time, and those who still live by them may in manycases have forgotten their true meaning, but the fact remains that they exist, they are accessible to us and,like a charred but still just legible document, they provide confirmation of our viceregal identity.

The religions with which the Westerner is most closely acquaintedthose of Semitic origin and, perhaps,Buddhismare historical in character, first in the quite simple sense that they do have a history strictlycomparable to that of human institutions and temporal events, and secondly because the story of theirachievements and of the vicissitudes they have suffered takes a significant place in their teaching. Time aswe experience it in our daily lives is the background against which they are observed and understood.

The archaic doctrines, on the other hand, have no history. Their relationship to ordinary time has been thatof rocks towards the sea which gradually erodes them. In this lies their strength, insofar as they recallconditions before the dawn of recorded history, and their weakness, in that they cannot serve as models interms of which the men of our time might organize their lives. They might in a certain sense be said to restupon the fiction that nothing has changed, nothing has happened, since time began. They have survivedprecisely because events in time have been treated as meaningless unless they could be related back to thepre-temporal patterns of creation, reintegrated into these patterns and thus transcended so far as theirhistorical actuality is concerned. Inwardly, at least, they have made time stand still.

A particular characteristic quality of all traditional societies, says Mircea Eliade, is their opposition to theordinary concept of time and their determination constantly to return, through ritual action, to the mythicalmoment of their origin, the Great Time. Neither the objects of the exterior world n or human acts as suchhave any separate being or significancethey are real only as imitations of the universal, primordialgestures made by God or the gods at the moment of creation. Nothing is worth noticing or mentioning unlessit has been bathed in the waters of its source.

It follows that, for the ancients as for primitive peoples up to the present time, myth and history could notand cannot be separated, historical events being valid, in their view, only to the extent that they illustratedmythical themes. The modern historian, concerned to discover what really happened, has the unenviabletask of trying to separate the two, but for the ancients it was the myth the pre-temporal eventthat wastruly real and happenings came about only because the reverberations of this event determined thepatterns of time orif we translate this into religious termsthat it might be fulfilled which was spoken bythe prophets. On the one hand we have a view in terms of which the world could not under anycircumstances be thought of as separated from its timeless source, on the other a view which takes thisseparation completely for granted.

In the personal life as in the wider context of world events archaic man has considered the actions of dailylife to be realonly if they fill out the contours of a pre-existent and harmonious mould. There are certainways of hunting (or, in agricultural communities, of plowing, sowing and reaping), certain ways of eating andmaking love and constructing artifacts which are in accordance with the heavenly precedents handed downin the myths and rituals of his peopleWe must do what the gods did Thenand all other ways aredisorderly and ultimately unproductive. His thirst for the Real and his awareness that, if he commits himself

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to trivialities, he must himself become trivial and lose the quality of dignity, the quality of viceregality,dominates all his faculties. In the circumstances of our time, so far from our origins, it might be said that heis defeated before he even starts, that the stream of time now runs too fast and too fiercely to be resistedand that the echoes which still reach him from That Time are too dim to be effectively obeyed. This may beso. But he lives on as a reminder and as a sign for those who are prepared to understand.

The fact that archaic man is a survivor from a period when the conditions of human life were quite different

to what they now are makes it difficult for him to accept as natural misfortunes such as sickness, infertilityor accidental death which do not seem to us at all mysterious in their origin. For him they indicate adisruption of the harmony and order which still appear to him as normal since he retains, however dimly,some recollection of a time before these ills had become the common lot of our kind, and he thereforeascribes them to some disruptive act of witchcraft, or human failure. This is not really so remote from thereligious point of view which finds their cause in human sinfulness. For the primitive as, in a certain sense,for the Christian, we live commonly under a curse, but the formerbecause he has chosen to ignore thechanges which time has brought aboutis still surprised by this fact and tries to pin the fault on someone inhis immediate neighborhood.

Still at home in the world, still trusting the environment (which we see as something to be subdued andconquered), he assumes its innocence and blames himself or others like himself for the ills to which his fleshis heir. He does not see the rhythms of nature as phenomena of time: the alternations of day and night andthe changes of the lunar cycle and of the seasons are events which happened once and for all in That Time,

and his own life is integrated into their pattern because he and they are aspects of a single, timeless order.

And because time does not appear to him as a continuous, un-interrupted process, the changes which takeplace in the course of his life are in the nature of mutations. We know of only one rite of passage, thedreaded phenomenon of physical death, whereas the life of archaic man is scattered with deaths andrebirthsrites of naming, puberty, marriage and so oneach representing a harsh severance from the pastand a total break with the habits and attachments of his former existence, so that he might be expected tore-emerge from the ritual moment into the light of common day with a new name and a new identity. In sucha context physical death cannot have the quality of uniqueness that it has for us, but is simply the greatestand most cataclysmic of the rites of passage. He does not need to think or talk in terms of a life afterdeath since he is accustomed to regard every ending as the necessary prelude to a new beginning. Hehimself, in this most intimate selfhood, is projected into the primordial moment when everything began andevery death, every break in continuity, coincides with the primal sacrifice out of which time and multiplicitywere born into their fiery and self-consuming existence.

Rooted in a coherent world and free from the oppressive sense of meaninglessness which time andmultiplicity induce when they are seen as self-subsisting, this man could scarcely be expected to ask thequestions that we ask or to search high and low for a significance which (in his experience) saturates boththe common objects of sense and the ordinary events which compose a human life-span. It is a fundamentalassumption of all traditional doctrines, whether archaic or religioushowever their outward forms maydifferthat men have been provided not only with the mental, emotional and sensory equipment necessaryfor them to be able to cope with their worldly environment but also with answers to all the real questions thatcan be asked. The question that remains unanswered is the one that has been posed in the wrong terms.

These answers, however, are not of a kind to satisfy the questioning mind when it breaks loose from thepersonality as a whole and demands that everything should be translated into its own specific terms; nor canthey be passed from hand to hand like coins. These answers are, by their nature, bonds of connectionbetween the individual and all that is; but because they relate not to the partial but to the whole man itfollows that the whole man must be apt to receive them if they are to mean anything to him. Division andturbulence, obscurity or falsity at any level of his being, will set barriers in the way of total understanding; fortotality can only be comprehended by totality: It is not the eyes which grow blind. It is the hearts within thebreasts that grow blind.[1]

Two quite different kinds of difficulty provide barriers to human understanding. The first (with which we arewell acquainted in our age) is the technical difficulty of matters which require special training and instructioncombined with an active practical intelligence if they are to be grasped, and in this case the barrier is therefor all to seeno one supposes that he can master a book on nuclear physics merely because he is able toread. The second kind of difficulty is more subtle and perhaps more deceptive since it relates to the

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understanding of statements, symbols and stories which, on the surface, appear transparently simple andwide-open even to the most naive and least instructed intelligence. Like the tests which the traditional heroundergoes, but with a less obvious challenge, they try each man's capacity to plumb the depths of the truththat is offered to his under-standing, but they also allow those of small capacity to think they have graspedall that there is to be grasped. In this sense they are, almost by definition, merciful, in that they give to eachas much as he is able to receive. But there is always the danger that those who see only the concreteimage, the outer husk, andthinking themselves intelligentassume that there is nothing more to be seen

will dismiss such truths as being too trivial to merit their further attention.

Of this attitude, which is the common one of our time both towards the symbolic formulations of primitivepeoples and towards the religious scriptures, one might say as the Jamaicans do of a stupid man whosupposes himself intelligent: Him is so ignorant that him don't even know him don't know. The symbolicand analogical modes of thought which were natural to our remote ancestors and are still natural to certainarchaic peoples are regarded as primitive in the evolut ionary sense of the term, that is, as lacking insomething that has since been acquired in the way of understanding. People speak of pre-logical modes ofthought, implying that those who employed such modes were incapable of the full exercise of reason andtherefore a little less than human.

There is, however, a totally different view than can be taken of such matters and of our modern incapacity tothink in the concrete and synthetic terms of symbol and analogy. According to this view, the transformationof symbols into rational concepts and into the ABC of explicit doctrines is to be regarded, not as an

evolutionary advance, but as a concession to Man's diminishing aptitude for grasping any truth in its totality,its variety of aspects and it suprarational richness and density of meaning. It is the fool rather than theintelligent man who needs to have everything explained to him.

As Schuon has pointed out on a number of occasions, the explicit doctrine is already inherent in thesymbolic formulation. Its deployment in terms of discourse and argument adds nothing to it and can neverexhaust its meaning. Indeed, when the majority of people have begun to take symbols literally so that itbecomes necessary to state in conceptual form what was previously implicit, there is an unavoidableimpoverishment of meaning in the process of fitting it to the rigid limitations of human language. In our timelearned men find it necessary to write whole books to explain the significance of one symbol in all the varietyof its implications. And if all the trees in the earth were pens and the sea, with seven more seas to help it,were ink, the words of God could not be exhausted.[2]

Symbols are, in the first place, things. Our understanding of them depends upon our capacity for seeing theelements of our environment as they really are (or in terms of what they really mean) rather than as theyappear in terms of human appetite. And the essential truth, says Schuon, is that everything, each thing,each energy by the fact that it exists... represents a possible entry towards the Real. [3]The processwhereby the environment gradually congeals or loses its quality of transparency, until things are no morethan objects which can either be put to practical use or else be kicked aside because they get in our way, isthe same as the process whereby symbols are drained of meaning and reduced to the level either of poeticallegory or of primitive science. For modern man, only the objects of sense appear unquestio nably real,while everything else is either subjective or abstract. For archaic man, reality resides not in the object assuch but in what it signifies: stripped of this significance it is a shadowy thing on the verge of non-existence.

We are free, being what we are, to regard such a view as false, but we only make fools of ourselves if wedismiss it without even bothering to ask what it is all about and without considering if only for a momentthe possibility that we might be wrong. For this is the only heritage we have. Our human past has nothingelse to offer us. And before we resign ourselves to abject poverty (comforted, no doubt, by the forlorn hopethat science will eventually make us rich) we might do well to recall Pascals question as to whether the heirto a fortune would ever think of dismissing his title-deeds as forgeries without troubling to examine them.Folly, however, is more often the symptom of a vice than of a lack of intelligence, and it is not uncommon forarrogance to induce a willful blindness. If history is bunk and our human past a tale of ignorance andsuperstition, then we might claim to be giants; but if we are the heirs of men who were nobler than us andknew more than we do, then we are pygmies and must bow our heads in shame.

* * *

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There is no virtue in the accumulation of factual knowledge for its own sake, and to suggest that humanintelligence is soon confused and, indeed, clogged when it is fed with too many irrelevancies is not to belittlethis intelligence. But once men have wandered outside the normal limitations of the knowledge that is usefulto them in terms of their spiritual and physical needs, then it becomes necessary, not to bring them back tothe limited perspective (which is impossible, since history cannot be reversed), but to balance the scraps ofknowledge they have picked up as a dog picks up stray bones with an awareness of truths which set thesescraps in their proper context.

What possible relevance can the habits of some ancient people or of an Australian aboriginal tribe have tothe lives of people in modern Europe or America? None, until the latter have strayed outside their own worldand begun to concern themselves with such things. But once this concern exists it may lead us to a region offalse ideas which devastate our homelandlike deadly bacteria brought back from outer spaceunlessthey can be rectified in terms of a perspective wider than any that is provided by a purely local viewpoint. Ifwe insist upon knowing about things which are, from the practical point of view, none of our business, thenwe have to grow a few inches to accommodate this strange knowledge. Otherwise our capacity forcomprehending the world, our world, as a whole that makes sense may burst at the seams.

The ordinary Christian of earlier times did not need to know that God has spoken in many languages andthrough a great variety of masks, and the disturbing fact that the vessels in which this Speech is preservedare necessarily relative in character was irrelevant to his salvation. He was securely lodged in a religiouscontext that fulfilled his real needs, answered his questions and provided him with his bridge to eternity. All

that concerned him was to perfect and intensify his own way to God, making use of the entirely adequatedoctrinal and ritual supports available to him: the knowledge that there existed alternative ways, equallyeffective for those to whose habits and patterns of thought they were adjusted, could not have helped him inthis task. And if, through ignorance, he assumed that his own faith was the only truth and that such others ashe might hear of through travelers' tales were necessarily false, this did no harm. It was when thegeographical barriers came down and the Europeansfirst Christian and, later, ex-Christianfanned outover the globe that the situation changed radically.

No blame can be attached to a person for attacking a foreign Tradition in the name of his own belief if it isdone through ignorance purely and simply, says Schuon; when however this is not the case, the personwill be guilty of a blasphemy, since by outraging the Divine Truth in an alien form he is merely profiting by anopportunity to offend God without having to trouble his own conscience. This is the real explanation of thegross and impure zeal displayed by those who, in the name of religious conviction, devote their lives tomaking sacred things appear odious...[4]A study of certain aspects of Christian missionary endeavor

suggests that there was indeed a gross and impure zeal at work, but this zeal has been intensified in theservice of the pseudo-religion of progress.

So long as a particular religion is contained and insulated in its own world (the frontiers of which have beendetermined by geographical or racial factors) the arguments and dogmas upon which the faith of the majorityof believers is based can remain, in the precise sense of the term, parochial. Their narrowness and theirvulnerability to criticism founded upon a more sophisticated knowledge or a more rigorous logic than isprovided by the parish worthies, does not matter if they are effective, that is to say, if they open windowsonto the truly universal. They can, of course, only do this if they are within the limits of certain terms ofreferenceadequate representations of the truth, but such representations do not need to be very subtle orvery comprehensive so long as they serve to awaken the truth that is already present at the centre of man'sbeing or, from another point of view, to open his heart to the action of Grace.

But religious dogmas are particularly vulnerable to those who, instead of using them as stepping-stones to aforgotten but still recover-able knowledge, sit down to examine and analyze their structure. Dogmaticdoctrine cannot be more than an aide-memoire. It collapses when treated as though it were a scientificstatement, for what it represents cannot be simply stated in the way that the laws which govern themovements of the planets or the formation of crystals can be stated. The latter belong to our own level ofexistence and may be expressed in the language of our kind, whereas the truths towards which dogmas(like symbols) point the way are not reducible to any of the dimensions of relativity. They will not come downto us, except in the form of intimationsbait for the spirit not yet entirely submerged in the glassy depths. Itis we who are required to go to that central place where they reside in their essential fullness, and thecertainty that we are able to do this is among the basic certainties upon which the religions, as well as the

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primordial doctrine, have built their castles. When this is lost sight ofand the innermost room of the castleis locked upreligion loses its raison d'etre and falls into decay.

And of course we lose sight of this certainty. It gets buried under the debris of the centuries. But theinnermost room is still there and the lock will still turn though the key may be rusty; for the reservoir of Gracewhich is the luminous centre of every Revelation is timeless, immune from the process of decay whicherodes its temporal outworks. God does not retreat: it is we who go away.

Our absence (carried downstream from our spiritual home) has been, according to traditional teaching, theoccasion for the great religious Revelations which, if they could not outwardly and objectively restore theprimordial harmonyfor Paradise lost is not regained at the same level of existenceat least madepossible an inward and spiritual restoration which might be reflected in the environment so far as thecircumstances of the time permitted; and indeed the tales common to Christianity, Islam and Buddhism ofthe transformation of matter or of concord between men and beasts in the presence of the saints suggeststhat the environment has been restored to something of its primordial perfection at such moments. But thevery fact that these moments have to be described as miraculous reminds us that time goes on.

It is as ferry-boats equipped to carry men across the stream of time (rather than as dams blocking thestream) that the world's religions have provided the means of salvation. What men are to be saved fromis fragmentation, dismemberment, and dispersal in multiplicity, and what they stand to lose in such a

process of fragmentation, is their real identity as human beings. The unity which a particular religionimposes upon its people is necessarily somewhat rigid, at least in its outward forms, but this is the nature offerries, and it is only as rigid structures that they can serve their purpose. The fact that one religion forbidswhat another permits, or that sexual and alimentary regulations are not the same for all, in no wayundermines the validity of these rules in their own context, as parts of a single, seaworthy structure whichhas been built in the light of a particular religious perspective. The perspective determines the blueprint andthe method of construction, while the given environment provides the materials.

Those in our time who assert their right to approach God in their own way and condemn all organizedreligion seem unaware that, even if they themselves are capable of making this approach (as, in the natureof things, some few may be), they are also asserting the right of other men to drown and perhapscondemning them to drowning. The question that has to be posed is not whether the possibility exists of aman breaking through to Reality on his own, without the assistance of traditional supports and a religiousframework, but whether this in fact happens save in the most exceptional cases. The answer to the first

question would necessarily be in the affirmative, since it deals only with possibilities and with God all thingsare possible. But the second can only receive a negative answer. And this is what matters. Churches andtemples are necessary, not because God is what He is, but because we are what we are. Though presenteverywhere, He is most easily found wherever a particular religious crystallization has, like a burning glass,focused the rays of His Grace.

Such words as structure and crystallization suggest something rather more concrete than an idea or anaspiration. As we have seen, the life of archaic peoples is so thoroughly determined by their myths,symbols and rituals that what happens outside this sacred framework can hardly be said to exist. For themthere can be no opposition between sacred and profane, since they are unacquainted with the profane.Given the conditions of a later time and the increasing remoteness of our world from its divine source, theworld's religions have had to face this opposition, although the extent to which they have acknowledged itsexistence varies greatly. The orthodox Hindu has much in common with archaic man and is scarcely awareof a profane sphere set over against his ritual practice. The Moslem who still lives in a tight-knit Islamiccommunity knows something of the same cohesion of life in the world with religious life. The case ofChristianity is quite different.

The Hindus never questioned the subordination of the temporal power to the spiritual, and Islam brought itsown corner of the world under the rule of the spiritual descendents of the Prophet. But Christianity came intobeing in a hostile environment which was therefore by implication profane. Unlike Hindus or Moslems,Christians were immediately in contact with things that were not sacred and had to compromise with theprofane sphere (or suffer martyrdom). Since the religion did not contain within itself such rules of conductand of political organization as are set out in the Hindu scriptures and in the Qoran, it had to assimilate muchof its worldly structure from the Hebraic environment into which it was born and from the Romanenvironment into which it grew to maturity. Even at the height of its power, when Christendom was mighty

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and unified, a distinction was admitted between the spiritual and the temporal (therefore profane) sphereswhich would have seemed intolerable to Moslems at the time when the Islamic civilization was at its zenith.

It was always more natural to Christians than to others to suppose that there were aspects of human lifewhich lay outside the immediate orbit of religion. These things could be kept in orderor neutralizedsolong as men acted as good Christians in relation to them, but they did not in themselves belong to thesphere of the sacred. Through this loophole, unimportant so long as the majority of Westerners thought

primarily in terms of being good Christians, has crept the entirely profane world of our age which goes itsown way while permitting the survival of religion as a personal matterso long as it does not interfere inmore important domains.

Personal faith is one thing, religion another. The two are intimately bound up with one another, but thedistinction must be made. A man may pursue a spiritual path in isolation from his social and economicenvironment, but the very idea of religion implies the in-corporation of the public realm in a spirituallydetermined pattern so that not just a man but all men are assisted towards their goal by everything they doand everything they touch in the normal course of their daily lives. The ferry-boat is a world in itself, an arksupplied with all the necessities of life.

But things break away. First one aspect of living claims autonomy, then another, building themselves theirown little shipsbut ships for sailing downstream, in accordance with the direction of time, not for crossing

over. Politics, science, industry, art and literature go their way, each proudly independent of everythingexcept the current itself and their own increasing momentum. Until finally one more little ship is added to theflotilla calling itself, perhaps, Religion Adapted to the Needs of Our Time and carrying certain regulationsgoverning the personal life and a cargo of ideals. Somehow it never quite manages to keep up with the rest :possibly some memory tugs at it, against the pull of the stream, or the strangeness of its cargo sets it apart.

To question the usefulness of any attempt to adapt religion to what are supposed to be the needs of our timeis not to decry the intrinsic value of personal piety or, indeed, to underestimate the nobility of those who livea Christian life in the contemporary context: what is questionable is the propriety of diluting truth for thesake of meeting error halfway and of applying evolutionary theory to the marks of eternity that areembedded in the matrix of the temporal world. To put the point bluntly, if God wished to speak to the modernworld it may be supposed that He would find a way of doing so. There is a limit to how far men can go ininterpreting the divine Word in terms of a language from which all the appropriate words have beenexcluded. If people have gone away from the central place that is their real home, then charity requires that

they should be shown the way back. To imagine one can take the centre out to themwhile they stay wherethey areis folly.

The effort to make religionand in this case it is Christianity with which we are specifically concerned acceptable to as many people as possible has a way of defeating its own object. This has happened to astriking degree in the Protestant countries, where Christianity has too often been reduced to a matter ofmorality and idealism. But there are two quite separate factors that come together to undermine faith and toblock the spread of religion. In the first place there is the refusal to admit that the very structure ofcontemporary life (in particular the work by which the vast majority of people have to earn their living)excludes religion, being profane in root and branch, and that Christianity can only be integrated into thisstructure if it denies its own truth. The success of certain extremist sects which have flatly refused tocompromise with the modern world suggests that compromise is not in fact essential to the survival ofChristianity. Secondly, Protestant Christians have to a great extent cast aside their meta-physical andintellectual heritage for the sake of appealing to ordinary people, and the Catholic Church now seemsready to follow their example.

These ordinary people may not be greatly concerned with intellectual considerations, but those from whomthey take their cuethose who, in the long run, have the most effective influence upon their ideas areconcerned. An ironic situation has arisen: Christianity has been simplified and de-intellectualized to make itmore palatable to the majority, and instead of gratefully accepting this watered-down religion, the majorityhave looked to the more educated, more questioning and intellectually demanding minority for guidance.The latter, after one glance at the pap that is on offer, have turned their thumbs down.

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This is, in itself, an over-simplification. There are members of the effective elite who have chosen to lookinto the matter for themselves and have rediscovered the metaphysical roots of the Christian religion andothers who have been content to go down on their knees in simple faith, and among relatively 'uneducatedpeople there are those who demand intellectual satisfaction. But it cannot be denied, particularly in this ageof mass media, that a Church which cannot or will not appeal to the leaders of opinion must sooner or laterlose the masses and that the ignorance of Christian doctrine (and Christian symbolism) displayed by thosewho dismiss religion as a fairy story is so abysmal that one can only assume they were never told any more

of Christianity than a simple-minded missionary might see fit to tell supposedly simple savages. Religion,when its metaphysical and mystical core is forgotten, is eminently attackable from the point of view ofthose who accept the scientific view in its entirety, but what is in fact attacked (whether in privateconversation or through the mass media) is the religion of tiny tots, Sunday School Christianity. And theattack is met with Sunday School argument.

When two mena priest, perhaps, and a scientistsit down before the television camera to discussreligion, the priest might be supposed to have three courses open to him. Scornful of the scientist'sintellectual provincialism, he could bring down on the latter's head the full weight of ancient doctrine, with allits metaphysical depth, its complexity of definitions, its swift transition between levels of symbolism; or hemight rise to his feet and call upon God to strike down his adversary in an immediate manifestation of thedivine Wrath (for who is to say that miracles no longer happen if no one demands them any longer?). Finally,he might ask the man to go away and find out something about Christianity instead of asking foolishquestions. But anger is now thought unseemly in a Christian, and doctrine is too complicated for little minds.

Nor must there be any hint that terror lies in wait for a world which goes astray or that the consequences ofliving in error can be a great deal more serious than the consequences of living in sin.

In the event, this discussion is a cozy affair. The scientist demolishes religion as it is understood by a goodchild. The man of God, while completely accepting the theory of knowledge upon which the scientist hasbuilt his argument, defends religion in the language of a good child. Both, it seems, learnt the same lessonsat school. Both, perhaps, recited the verse which begins, Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild... But one cast itaside, while the other was touched by it, neither of them aware of how inappropriate such a verse (or othersof its kind) might be in the context of a religion drenched in the blood of the martyrs and of the hereticsand flowing from a Revelation which, like every catastrophic inbreak of Reality, brought down among men,not peace, but the sword.

Though God has said to the Islamic world, My Mercy precedes my Wrath, Moslems have never imaginedthat Wrath was abolished by its subordination to the ultimately all-embracing Mercy. But contemporary

Christianitypartly in reaction against the Hell-raising fulminations of the eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturieshas drifted into a situation in which God is defined entirely in terms of the nicest human qualitiesand anthropomorphic symbolism is taken so literally that the Absolute is humanized to the point of absurdity.From this has sprung the natural reaction of those who are unable to forgive God for not being a Christian asthey were taught to understand the term, the anger of men betrayed by those whom they most trusted, thesad blasphemies of those whoseeing a sick world around themcan only ascribe its creation to amonstrously sick deity, while the real villains of the peace, the gentle teachers of the good child's rel igion, gogently on their way.

Thibon has written concerning the simple tale of the creation of God by man and there is nothing surprisingin this since God in Himself isas the theologians teachuncreated whereas images, ideas and conceptsare of the order of created things. Of necessity the tiger knows a tigerish deity, and among men only thosefew who have sloughed off their own image and achieved within themselves a kind of total nudity can knowGod otherwise than through their own image. But what is seen through this warped glass is nonetheless

there, and the humanized image serves as a bridge to a region beyond the limitations imposed upon allcreated images provided it is recognized as a bridge. The great danger is that it will be mistaken for astopping-place rather than as a point of departure, and this is the danger to which Christianity, at least inmodern times, seems to have been particularly exposed. Europeans have always beenin a rather specialsense of the termsimple-minded (the ancient Romans were) and peculiarly inclined to take the symbol forthe thing symbolized, always trying to reduce all that is to manageable proportions and to confine it withinthe bounds of common sense. They have succeeded at last in reducing God to the dimensions of an OldMan in the Sky and, having achieved this, are horrified to discover what a useless (and immoral) Old Manthis is.

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Just as individual men risk spiritual suffocation in a world less and less capable of recognizing any valuesbeyond those of the social realm, so religion is in danger of separation from its timeless source if it chasesafter the little ships that are being carried so far downstream: there is a process at work here that canculminate only in an existence which is no more than a simian parody of human life. And this existence, in itsbrief time, would be close to the condition which Christians define as hell: a separation from Reality as nearto completion as may be possible (a fraction of a degree above absolute zero) and, since pain is thesymptom of separation, an agony of cosmic proportions.

NOTES

[1]Qoran. 22:46.

[2]Qorn. 31:27.

[3]Images de l'Esprit: Frithjof Schuon. p. 100.

[4]The Transcendent Unity of Religions: Frithjof Schuon (Faber and Faber) p. 28.

Shaikh Abdal-Hakim Murad singing Imam Al-Haddads poem (Allah have mercy upon him), Qad

Kafani Ilmu Rabbi:

my Lords knowledge has sufficed me

from asking or choosing

For my dua and my agonizing supplication

is a witness to my poverty.

For this secret I make supplication

in times of ease and times of difficulty

I am a slave whose pride

is in his poverty and obligation

O my Lord and my King

You know my state

And what has settled in my heart

of agonies and preoccupations

Save me with a gentleness

from You, O Lord of LordsOh save me, Most Generous

before I run out of patience

My Lords knowledge has sufficed me

from asking or choosing

O One who is swift in sending aid

I ask for aid that will arrive to me swiftly

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It will defeat all difficulty

and it will bring all that I hope for

O Near One Who answers

and All-Knowing and All-Hearing

I have attained realization through my incapacity,

my submission and my brokenness

My Lords knowledge has sufficed me

from asking or choosing

I am still standing by the door, so please my Lord

have mercy on my standing

And in the valley of generosity, I am in itikaf (solitary retreat)

So, Allah, make my retreat here permanent

And Im abiding by good opinion (of You)

For it is my friend and ally

And it is the one that sits by me and keeps me company

All day and night

My Lords knowledge has sufficed me

from asking or choosing

There is a need in my soul, O Allah

so please fulfill it, O Best of Fulfillers

And comfort my secret and my heart

from its burning and its shrapnel

In pleasure and in happiness

and as long as You are pleased with me

For joy and expansion is my state

and my motto and my cover

My Lords knowledge has sufficed me

from asking or choosing

Notes on Fiqhus-Sunnah of as-Sayyid Sabiq

Author: Imaam al-AlbaniSource: Tamaam ul-Minnah Fit-Ta'liq alaa Fiqh us-Sunnah (trans. Dawud Burbank)

Article ID : WKH030001 [

Note: References to page nos are to the English translation of Muhammad Saeed Dabas and Jamalud -

Deen M. Zarabozo

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Volume One

(43) P. vi "This book deals with the fiqh questions and provides supporting evidence to them from the clear

[text of the] Book (of Allaah), and the authentic Sunnah of the Prophet, sallallaahu alaihi wa

sallaam."This is a claim true for the most part, however the book does contain many weak

(Daeef) ahaadeeth some of which he remained silent about, and the others he thought to

besaheeh orhasanfollowing others in that and being mistaken therein. And it contains more than a few

questions for which he does not mention a proofrather for some of them, the proof is against them. And

this will be more fully explained in its correct places inshaa-Allaah.

(43) P. viii line 10, "In Saheeh al-Bukhaaree it is recorded from Abu Saeed al-Muqbiri that the Messenger

of Allaah, sallallaahu alaihi wa sallaam, said, "This religion is easy ...""The narrator of the hadeeth is

Saeed ibn Abee Saeed al-Muqbiree from Aboo Hurairah. The wording of al-Bukhaaree Book of

Imaan is "The religion is easy ..." the wording, "This religion is easy ..." is reported by an-Nasaaee and Ibn

Hibbaan.

P. 44 p. viii line 13, "In Saheeh Muslim a hadeeth says, "The most beloved religion..."The hadeeth is in

fact reported by al-Bukhaaree in his Saheeh without isnaad and in hisAadaabul-Mufradwithconnected isnaad, and is reported by Ahmad in al-Musnadand others from Ibn Abbaas from the

Prophet,sallallaahu alaihi wa sallaam. It is not reported by Muslim. The hadeeth isHasan Lighairihi.

[Tamaamul-Minnah p. 44, as-Saheehah, no. 881]

(45) p. ix 5 lines from the end, "There is a hadeeth where the Prophet, sallallaahu alaihi wa sallaam,

prohibited the discussion of events that have not yet occurred."This hadeeth is reported by Aboo Daawood,

Ahmad and others and is weak (Daeef) due to one of its narrators, Abdullaah ibn Sad.

P. x line 1, "The Prophet, sallallaahu alaihi wa sallaam, also stated, "Allaah has made certain things

obligatory ...""DeclaredDaeefby Shaikh al-Albaanee due to its chain being disconnected between

Makhool and Aboo Thalabah the companion.

Ghayatul-Maraam (no. 4), al-Mishkaat(no. 197) and al-Imaan (p. 43) of Shaikh al-Albaanee.Jaamiul-

Uloom wal-Hikam of Ibn Rajab, no. 30.

(46) p. 2 no. (iii), "Alee narrated ... This hadeeth is related by Ahmad."It is reported by Abdullaah ibn

Ahmad. Thehadeeth is hasan, [Irwaaul-Ghaleel, no. 13].

(46) p. 4 25th line, "There is also a hadeeth from Abdullaah ibn Umar ... however this hadeeth is

mudtarab ..."Rather it is Saheehonly some weak narrations of it are mudtarab. (Irwaaul-Ghaleel, no. 23

and 172]

(47) p. 5 3rd

paragraph, "The hadeeth of Jaabir ..."The hadeeth is weak, as an-Nawawee says in al-Majmoo, (1/173).

(48) p. 5 3rd paragraph, "It has also been related from Ibn Umar ..."Also weak. Its isnaadcontains

Ayyoob ibn Khaalil al-Harraanee who isDaeefand on top of that he causes idtiraab in its isnaad.

(48) p. 5 3rd paragraph, "Yahya Ibn Saeed ..."It is reported from Umar by Yahyaa ibn Abdir-Rahmaan

ibn Haatib (who was not born until after the death of Umar) not by Yahyaa ibn Saeed. It is therefore weak

(munqati).

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(49) p. 7 "The bones, horns, ... skin ... of dead animals ... all of these are considered pure " Rather the

skin of dead animals is established to be impure due to the many ahaadeeth from the Prophet, sallallaahu

alaihi wa sallaam, such as his, sallallaahu alai