KNOWLEDGE

AND ITS

by Gai Eaton, Winter 1974

COUNTERFEIT

IT would not be particularly surprising if the notion of mans

viceregal dignity were unacceptable to a number of people.
What is really astonishing is that it should now be unimaginable to
the majority of people in the Westor perhaps one should say to
the majority of educated people everywhere. That a view of the
world and of mans destiny which could, until so recently, be
counted as a normal human characteristic should be dismissed in
its entirety as a fairy story would be incredible if it had not actually
happened.

No wonder that some of those who hold to the traditional view

believe that the devil himself has bewitched our kind, putting to
sleep the faculties through which they were formerly aware of
realities beyond the field of sense-perception and making use of
mirages to lead them on into the waterless desert. But the process
of deception can at least be charted and analysed in fairly simple
terms, not least in terms of what Mircea Eliade has called the
provincialism of modern thought.

In the first place, our contemporaries ascribe their own basic

assumptions to the people of other times and other cultures and
therefore suppose that if they did not deduce what we have
deduced from these assumptions they must necessarily have
been our inferiors. It is taken for granted that their beliefs were
derived as ours are from the observation of physical phenomena
and that they were always trying to do what we in fact have
done. It is not unusual for children to enjoy a sense of superiority
over parents who cannot climb trees as well as they can or who
make a mess of a jigsaw puzzle that is no problem to an eightyear-old. A child may wonder why a grown-up who can afford to
buy ice-cream or chocolates every day of his life does not do so,
just as we are puzzled that the ancients did not turn their minds to

science. Grown-ups, however, have other things which demand

their attention.

In this sense, modern provincialism is essentially childish. It

assumes that if all we want is ice-cream, then this is all that people
ever wanted. They did not know how to produce it quickly,
hygienically and in quantity. We do. They would have given the
little they possessed to have motor cars and aeroplanes, but they
were not clever enough to invent them. We have invented and
made them (it was not, after all, very difficult). And they thought
the Earth was the centre of the Universe. We know better.

This kind of argument may not be produced by intellectuals, but it

is brought out again and again by ordinary people and
swallowed whole by non-Europeans who, having shaken off
Western political domination, submit like lambs to the imperialism
of Western ideas and feel ashamed that they themselves did not
invent the car and the aeroplane. In this mood of shame and selfhumiliation they may even become Marxist Socialists, which
makes them true Europeans in everything but the colour of their
skin.

The provincialism of modern thought is apparent, secondly, in the

rule of fashion, which governs philosophy and ideology as it does
the arts. The theory of evolution (as it is popularly understood) and
belief in progress make it almost inevitable that last years
thoughts and theories should be considered as out-of-date as last
years dress. Anddepending, as they do, upon the picture of the
world presented by physical sciencethese theories and thoughts
must change with the changing hypotheses by which scientists try
to interpret physical phenomena. If even our grandfathers were
ignorant of most of the facts upon which our present beliefs are

based, the thoughts of men far distant in time or unacquainted

with modern science are assumed to have been little more than
the fumbling notions of creatures just down from the trees. There
is, then, a provincialism in time which isolates the narrow world of
todayor this yearfrom all that went before.

Thirdly, and perhaps in the most significant sense, we are

provincial in that we live and think and have faith only within the
strict limits of faculties given to us to deal with our own small corner
of creation and ill-adapted (as is our language itself) to anything
beyond self-preservation and the getting of food. Our ideas of
truth and indeed of all that is are confined to what fits the
contours of a mind as limited in its way as are our physical senses;
and we are necessarily agnostics, in the exact sense of the term,
since it is obvious that the mind as such cannot knowwithin its
own terms of referencewhat lies beyond this particular locality
and the view visible from here.

The distinction between agnosticism and ignorance is an

important one in our age, particularly if one reduces the two terms
to their basic meaning : in the one case, There is nothing for me
to know; in the other, I do not know. The one raises a personal
incapacity to the dignity of a universal law, the other merely
admits incapacity and tries to live with it. The one claims to say
something about human nature; the other makes a personal
statement. And because it is our nature to universalise private
experience, it does not take long for ignorance to transform itself
into agnosticism, particularly in an egalitarian age. For the
emotional strength of the agnostic attitude lies in the refusal to
admit that anyone can be or could ever have been our superior
in this, the most important of all human functionsthe knowledge
of what there is to be known. Religion in our time is generally
thought of in terms of faith rather than of knowledge. In

egalitarian terms, faith is all right. You can believe in fairies if you
want to. But knowledge, the knowledge of realities beyond the
minds immediate compass, excludes those who do not possess it
and seems presumptuous. The idea that a saint among the saints
may have known Godnot merely believed in Him, as anyone is
free to dosuggests that someone has been enjoying an unfair
advantage, like a rich man who uses a loophole in the income-tax
law that is denied to the rest of us.

When it comes to matters of belief, each age has its particular set
of assumptions which appear to it self-evident (and form the basis
of its reasoning), and these assumptions are likely to exclude
others which seemed equally self-evident at a different time in
history. Reasoning always plays a subsidiary role, for reason does
not operate in a vacuumit works on the material presented to it
in the form of basic assumptions that are taken for granted.

It is in terms of our characteristic assumptions here and now that

most people are prepared to accept certain ideas on faith but
demand proof as soon as a different complex of ideas is
brought to their attention. One man says, Show me God and Ill
believe in him. But another might say, quite reasonably, Show
me an actual case of the transformation of species and Ill believe
in evolution. There is, however, an important difference between
the two cases. In the first, St. Augustines dictum, Believe in order
that you may know makes sense. In a certain sense, it may apply
in the second case as well, for we must believe in the scientists
basic assumptions before we can accept his theories as a form of
knowledge. But here the resemblance ends. We are not being
offered knowledge as such. The proposition to which we are
required to agree is that given these assumptions and given the
absolute validity of human reasoning, assuming also that the
simplest explanation of a particular phenomenon is always the

right one and that the physical world is sealed off from any
interference from other realms, then we would accept the
scientists conclusions if we had received the same technical
training as he had.

The scientific age is necessarily an age of blind belief. No longer

can men be told that the assumptions of their time will be
confirmed in their own personal experience if only they look
deeply enough into this experience; and, compared with the
arguments of theology, the arguments of contemporary science
are so abstract, so technical that they are no longer open to
criticism by the non-specialist and cannot be tested against any
kind of experience known to man as a living creature. We must
accept them or reject them on principle.

Meanwhile, the scientist himself requires a very special kind of

faith. He must assume the absolute validity of his own mental
processes and believe that the logic of these processes is a
universal law to which everything that is or ever could be
conforms. Not altogether unlike the man who interprets the
outside world in terms of what is going on in his own entrails,
seeing a bright day when he is feeling well and finding the world a
dark and sinister place when his system is choked with waste
products, he applies to the data provided by observation and by
its instruments the rules which govern his own mentality, a
mentality constructed for the practical business of living much as
the entrails are constructed for the digestion of food. Since inner
and outer are, in the last analysis, two sides of the same coin, he
will findif he has applied these rules accuratelythat the
protean physical world will provide the answers he expects of it
(the answers being already implied in the phrasing of his
questions) and experiments will confirm the conclusions he has

reached without ever, in fact, taking him beyond the subjective

realm.

However complex the machines and instruments we have

designed to extend the apparent range of our senses, scientific
exploration is always in some measure dealing with patterns
inherent in the exploring mind and meeting with the mirror images
it has projected. Nature mocks and eludes us, while seeming to fall
in with the framework dictated by our own logical process,
obliging us because our minds are themselves embedded in her
structure. We try to think of our-selves, so far as our mentality is
concerned, as standingor floating above the natural world,
competent to survey it objectively, and the intervention of
scientific instruments between our own naked senses and what is
observed heightens the illusion of objectivity; but what is by its
nature embedded in the matrix of the world can never escape
and look down as a disembodied agent upon its own matrix. That
element in man which does transcend the natural world is in him
but not of him, and the objectivity of its awareness is very different
from the fictional objectivity exercised by one facet of nature in
relation to another.

But while the scientist in his increasingly private and abstract

sphere finds a marvellous concordance between his mental
experience and the behaviour of a needle on a dial or the traces
of radiation on a photo-graphic plate, the ordinary man of our
time faces a widening gulf set between scientific fact and any
kind of immediate experience known to him. It might he said that
this gulf first showed itself when the fact that the earth circles the
sun was made generally known, displacing the factequally valid
in its own contextthat our normal experience is of a sun which
rises and sets, circling our central place.

The factsor supposed factswhich dominate most peoples

thinking today and which are presented in the schoolroom as the
linchpins of modern knowledge are for the most part quite
outside the range of our normal experience and quite unverifiable
in personal terms. While in no possible sense supernatural, they lie
beyond the framework of nature as we know it in our daily lives,
and their proof is to be found only in experiments carried out
under almost unimaginable conditions (at temperatures a fraction
above absolute zero, and so on) by means of immensely complex
equipment. In terms of experienceand a fact, after all, is
normally something against which we expect to be able to stub
our toesthis is a very remote and estoteric region. And it is partly
because the facts presented by contemporary science are
unverifiable in experience and because they have their source in
the extra-terrestial conditions created in the secrecy of the
laboratory that they have such power to bind and to dominate.
Their glassy surface offers no purchase to the sceptical probing of
the ordinary mind.

A field of knowledge in which the ordinary man can participate

only by believing what he is told corresponds well enough to the
political field of the monolithic State in which man participates
only by doing what he is told; while the conviction that every new
fact which is discovered adds to the universal store of
knowledge and that this quantitative increase in knowledge is an
unqualified good finds its echo in the notion that every
technological advance represents a plus sign in relation to the
increase of human wellbeing.

Speaking of the normal and providential limitation of the data of

experience, Schuon remarks that, while no knowledge is bad in

itself and in principle, many forms of knowledge can be harmful in

practice because they do not correspond to mans hereditary
habits and are imposed on him without his being spiritually
prepared; the soul finds it hard to accommodate facts that nature
has not offered to its experience, unless it is enlightened with
metaphysical knowledge or with an impregnable sanctity. The
unenlightened and unsanctified personality subjected to a
barrage of facts which contradict its own intimate experience
and contribute nothing to its growth and maturing is more likely to
be maimed than nourished.

Facts as such lodge only in the mind. In so far as our ideas are
changed, our feelings and our conduct will be affected, but the
ideas which induce this personality-change remain purely mental
in character and cannot normally be represented in other terms.
In sharp contrast to this, the metaphysical truths at the root of
human belief in other times, since they lie outside the boundaries
of the human personality as such, are no more exclusively mental
than they are exclusively emotional. They may be expressible in a
mental formulaan idea or a statementbut they cannot be
enclosed in this formula or confined within its necessary limitations.
In traditional societies they were reflected not merely in the
theories by which the mind organises its material, but also in myths
and symbols, in the structure of the mirrors which society held up
to its members and in the sacred or ritual element which entered
into the web of everyday lifeinto a mans waking and his
sleeping, his eating, his love-making, his fighting and his work.

When such truth as is supposed to be known lodges only in the

mind, man is divided against himself or elseif he achieves a kind
of enforced unitysubmits to the domination of the mental over
his other faculties. But what a man does, what he brands with his
name, is the expression of his whole personality, not simply of some

aspects of what he is. Fragmentation of the personality is

characteristic of modern as against primitive thought; and the
questions that are raised concerning mans role in society, the
distinction between creative work and labour, or patterns of
sexual behaviour only arise because of this fragmentation, this
dissociation of part from part.

Since responsibility is necessarily a function of the whole man,

those whose actions are dictated by only one part of their nature
find it dangerously easy to deny paternity when they are faced
with the consequences of what they have done. The scientist
whose pursuit of factual knowledge leads (indirectly, as it seems to
him) to certain undesirable developments is aware that he never
willed these developments, just as the man who rapes a young girl
under emotional compulsion knows quite well that he never
meant to harm her. The scientist may suggest that the pursuit of
knowledge for its own sake is natural to man, just as the rapist may
feel that emotion, if it is powerful enough, contains its own
justification; and both can take refuge in the excessive emphasis
upon motives and intentions which isolates modern man from the
great web of consequences which he actualises. But
consequences do follow acts, and they must belong to someone.

The dedicated scientist working long hours in his laboratoryyet

happy as a child at playcareless about money and charmingly
naive in matters of sex is a popular image, and although real
scientists are not always quite like this they can be forgiven for
adopting the required pose on occasions. Like so many masks, it
expresses a truth. And, when this same scientist is faced with the
consequences of his pursuit of knowledge, the truth behind the
pose becomes shockingly apparent; he reacts as someone so
dedicated to the task in hand thatlike the rapisthe could see
no further ahead. With indecent haste he searches for

scapegoats (wicked politicians or rapacious businessmen) who

have bent his innocent discoveries to their own purpose, he
having always supposed that none but angels would handle and
apply the knowledge he has wrung from his intercourse with the
natural world.

It is not as though he had never been warned. And this is perhaps

the most extraordinary feature of the scientists claim to
innocence. The very fact that he can practise his pursuit of
knowledge in freedom is, in his viewand according to what we
are all taught at schoolthe result of a hard-fought battle against
persecution, against obscurantism, against superstition. But
there is another way of looking at the obstructions which were
formerly placed in the way of scientific advance. A fence at the
edge of a cliff is an obstruction, but it has not been placed where
it is without reason; and to suppose that the men who raised these
obstructions in the way of science were quite without intelligence
or foresight is an impertinence which only reflects our own
stupidity. The investigation of the natural world in depth and the
pursuit of factual knowledge for its own sake were once regarded
as dangerous and ultimately destructive activities. It is absurd to
be surprised when these activities do turn out to be both
dangerous and ultimately destructive.

For Ibn Arabi, the greatest of the medieval Muslim philosophers,

such delving into the operations of nature was a form of incest, a
prying under the Mothers skirts. And this is one way of
characterising the efforts of one facet of the natural world to
know another facet bearing in mind the Biblical use of the verb
to know. The penetration of nature by the fact-finding and
analytic mind keeps time with the rape of the earth we tread and
the exploitation of our fellow creatures. An incestuous conjunction
of mind with matter engenders some monstrous offspring.

Few things are more irritating to those who accept the scientific
view in its entirety (while taking pride in their open-mindedness)
than the alternating attitudes of Olympian superiority and quiet
evasiveness which seem to them characteristic of the opponents
of science. And because the opponents of science are
necessarily on the defensive, in a world which is overwhelmingly
convinced of the truth of the scientific view, they are bound to
take refuge sometimes in mystery if not in mystification. A duellist
who is constantly challenged to fight with weapons of his
opponents choosing must keep some tricks up his sleeve.

But perhaps there is no duel to be fought or won. Perhaps these

antagonists have only the illusion of meeting and there is only the
spectaclefamiliar in farceof two men shadow-boxing at
opposite sides of the stage, ludicrously unaware that their blows
never make contact. For they are in different places. It is not
enough to share a common language, if there are no common
assumptions to provide an agreed basis for argument. Without
such a basis, argument leads only to a fever of irritation because
each participant feels that the other is missing the point. As,
indeed, he is, since the point is the truth as seen from the place
at which each has taken his stand and they are too far apart to
share the same view of the mountain which is the ultimate theme
of their dialogue.

This, however, suggests or could be taken to suggest that the

different views are of equal validity. When it comes to a question
of perspectives, even if we ignore the possibility of a total view,
there is a distinction to be made between the narrow perspective
and the broad one, the provincial perspective and a more

universal one, The idea that it is possible to see another mans

point of view implies to some extent that it is possible to be that
other man. Points of view can never entirely coincide, even within
an integrated and virtually unanimous society, but they can be
sufficiently close under normal circumstances for some kind of
dialogue to be possible. The situation in which we now find
ourselves is not a normal one so far as the human race is
concerned. Heirs of a fairly unified culture, we retain the habit of
taking for granted a certain uniformity of viewpoint, but in our age
it is possible for men living side-by-side in the same society to pass
their lives in totally different worlds.

Because such a situation is by nature painful, those who take their

stand upon the religious view, being in a minority and respecting
democratic practice, have gone to extraordinary lengths to meet
their scientific stable-mates rather more than halfway, as though
a man who had been looking over a fence were to squat down
for the sake of keeping company with his childrenand peer
through the hole they have bored in the wood, swearing that this
is all that can possibly be seen of the world next door.

If provincialism is taken to mean narrowness of view, then Eliades

phrase is particularly apt in the context of the process of
contraction which has been taking place for a long time and was
already well advanced when Descartes made awareness of his
own thinking-self the starting-point of human knowledge, but took
care to shut the doors and windows before sinking into the cavern
of mental self-awareness. To all appearances, the outer world has
expanded as the inner one has contracted. The small, vaulted
universe, lit by a friendly lamp and haunted by familiar spirits, has
opened out into the unimaginable vastness of space with its thin
population of burning stars, while a vast spiritual world extending
from nadir to Empyrean has contracted to the dimensions of the

skull-box; and one might visualise this process (so well expressed in
the scientific theory of an expanding universe) in terms of a
childs bubble-blowingan objective world which increases in
sheer size as man pumps his life-breath into it. But size, unless it has
human significance, is meaningless and as nothing in relation to a
timeless eternity. A distance of a million light years is further than a
man could walk: and having said this there is little more to be said
about such distances. They are irrelevant to the business of being
a man.

It is in this senseand in no otherthat man is the measure of all

things. If he is Viceroy, his concern in time is with the province that
is given him as his particular destiny. His concern beyond this
province is with an eternity that is not subject to contraction or
expansion. With the contraction of mans idea of his own identity,
the outer world has grown in size, but it has become a desert.

If we acknowledge that on a certain level (a level beyond the

causal web of everyday life) the distinction between inner and
outer, though it may still have a certain symbolic significance, is
no longer final or even useful, then arguments regarding mans
dependence upon his environment or his environments
dependence upon him lead no further than does the dispute as
to which came firstthe chicken or the egg. But we are free to
employ figures of speech which suggest the precedence of one
over the other without prejudice to the wider view which sees
both as aspects of a single identity, just as we may employ the
practical terminology of cause-and-effect without in any way
denying a Divine Omnipotence for which the chain of action and
reaction is only the projection in time of a single and timeless
event. It is all a matter of levels and perspectives, of situating
apparently opposed ideas and irreconcilable facts where they
belong.

To attempt to fit aspects of the truth which belong to different

levels and make sense according to different perspectives into
one framework at one particular level (that of the laws which
govern our mental processes in the context of everyday life) is an
impossible task. It is also an unnecessary task, for we ourselves do
not exist on one level only. But this is what rationalism, with its twodimensional scheme of things, tries to do, and this is why the
scientific view, isolated in its two-dimensional world, cannot be
attacked on its own ground or in terms of the proofs and
arguments which it considers valid.

It would be too easyand yet partially trueto say that rationalism is false simply because it is an -ism. In fact it is false because
of its pretensions to universality, its claim to include the whole of
reality within its own orbit, and its exclusion of everything that
cannot be fitted into its particular and local categories. Reason is
a mode of knowledge. Rationalism is its characteristic Pharonic
sin.

Man is a rational being, but he is also something more than that.

Reason is his toolnot his definition. The cancerous tendency of
the part to behave as though it were the whole operates here as
in so many other fields. Reason functions in terms of strict and
irreconcilable alternatives. This is black or white. This creature is
either male or female. Either this animal will eat me or I shall eat it.
Such is its nature, since it is one of the tools given us to deal with
the context in which our mental and sensory experience unfolds.
And, since this experience is a form of true knowledge, the
instruments through which it is perceived and organised cannot
be falseso long as they keep their place. The man who believes
he can interpret all that is in terms of reason does not differ greatly

from one who thinks he can absorb and digest knowledge

through his belly.

Those who cannot accept that they add up to more than the sum
of their own instruments or that it does not necessarily follow
because this is true that that must be false and who will not
accept that the region of possible knowledge extends into
categories beyond those of human reason (and into moulds quite
unrelated to the contours of the human mind) are voluntary
prisoners in their own empirical and conditioned selfhood. Their
speculation is a ball bounced against the walls of their cell.

That there should be truths inconceivable in mental terms is

intolerable to the greedy mind (acting as Censor), and, in so far as
we submit to this censorship and are inwardly convinced that
knowledge is the province of the mind and of the mind only, we
cannot but dismiss the inconceivable as unknowable and, for all
practical purposes, unreal. Illusions are always conceivable
because illusions, as we understand the term, cannot exist without
our help and are rooted in our faculties. But truth does not need us
and is in no way dependent upon our powers of
conceptualisation. God, in His Essence, is said to be quite
inconceivable in terms of the minds language; but there is
nothing inconceivable about a flying hippopotamus, however
improbable we may suppose such a creature to be. The mind
comprehends facts and is at ease with fictions. It is not by its
nature apt to grasp realities.

But to be incapable of grasping something in the sense of

possessing and assimilating it does not necessarily imply complete
alienation. If the mind had no contact with reality, then we would
all be madder than mad, indeed we would not be here at allor

there or anywhere else. And if reality could not in some measure

be represented in mental, emotional and physical terms it would
not be reality. What has been lost in a mind-fixated age is the
awareness that the mental representation is by its nature limited
and incomplete, as is the emotional image or the physical symbol.
Truth is expressed in these different languages. It is not exhausted
by anything that they can say about it. And the antinomies which
exist at one level are reconciled at another.

There is a necessary tension in the religious and intellectual sphere

between acceptance and rejection of the partial images through
which mind, emotion and senses maintain their hold on reality.
Most of us cannot do without our mental concepts, our
anthropomorphic image of God and our physical symbols, and
the hidden truth responds to our need because it is by its nature
partially conceivable, a fit object for love, and present in the
sights, sounds, odours, flavours and tactile qualities of the physical
world. To reject such partial knowledge as is offered by our natural
faculties because it is no more than partial leads nowhere. It is the
folly of those who, when they are made aware that reason has its
limitations, turn to a kind of doctrinaire irrationalism. But to
suppose that truth in its wholeness can be encompassed by these
faculties is a form of idolatry.

The inveterate human tendency to idolatry (worship of the

reflection rather than of that which is reflected) is, in the Islamic
view, the most dangerous and the most universal of sins. The
Islamic Revelation broke in upon a culture which had petrified into
gross forms of idolatry at a time when the breaking of images and
the release of the spirit of truth from its stony prison were most
necessary. But outside of historic circumstances which determine
the accents and emphasis of a particular religion, this Revelation
had the providential function of redressing the balance between

those who try to bind the truth in mental formulae, emotional

fixations and physical images, and those who insist upon its
absolute transcendence over all that we are capable of thinking
or feeling or doing.

Without supernatural wisdomand without the humility which

recognises the subordination of reason to that wisdomit is
impossible for the human mind as such to keep the balance
between transcendence and immanence, reconciling the idea of
God as totally other (in Quranic terms, having no likeness
whatsoever) and the idea of God as intimately present in
everything that has existence (in Quranic terms, closer to man
than his jugular vein). But it remains a useful exercise for the mind
to set such contrary ideas side-by-side in its narrow cabin (as the
Zen Buddhists do by means of their paradoxical koans) until it
begins to sense, beyond its own reach, the presence of a point at
which the contraries meet.

When two ideas, each parcelled and capsulated in accordance

with our mental needs, appear at once irreconcilableas do the
notions of predestination and free willand yet necessary if
the world makes any kind of sense, then we can only reach out
towards that incomprehensible point. But, if that point is beyond
the reach of our bread-and-butter faculties and can never be
captured by a mind which insists upon absolute rights of
possession, this does not mean that it has no contact with the
world we inhabit, no relation to the human person in his totality.
On the contrary, the beliefnormal to mankindthat there is a
meaning inherent in everything that exists and in everything that
happens must necessarily imply the omnipresence of that point,
that truth, that centre.

Such argument as this is soon classified so far as those who hunger

after classification are concerned. This is mysticismor as near
to it as makes no difference. As such it can be dismissed, not with
the hostility and resentment which so often accompanies the
dismissal of organised religion, but with a gesture of respect,
even a muted sound of trumpets, as something too remote from
everyday life to represent a threata gentle and poetic
eccentricity. Yet there have been some good swordsmen among
the mystics who, like David, have slain their ten-thousands.

In so far as the term has any precise meaning, mystics have no

doubt existed and followed their inward path in all periods,
triumphing over the obstacles placed in their path by social chaos
or social regimentation, sharing the peculiar vocation of the
heroes and martyrs who stride over the turbulence or the
petrifiction of their world with all the splendour of elephants
rampaging through the bush. But the place they are going is the
place we are going. And most of us are not mystics, heroes or
potential martyrs. We are not even elephants.

This is where the attempt to isolate mystical experience from the

normal stream of life in the sense in which, for example, musical
experience may be isolated as something irrelevant to the lives of
those who cannot share it, breaks down. The mystic is different
from the rest only as the flyer is different from the walker, though
both must reach the city walls before nightfall. What he is talking
about is as much their business as his. But while he may find his
way unaided, the common man, the quite unelephantine man,
needs help and has a right to expect this help from the society in
which he lives; and human societies, if they are to make any claim
upon our loyalty beyond the claim of mutual convenience, exist
to beat a path through the bush for those who cannot fly or even
trample. To provide paths to the mystics goal which are

walkable by everyman is the justification of traditional human

societies, and it was as vehicles fit to carry multitudes across the
existential river that these societies demanded and received the
loyalty of their members. This was their title to legitimacy.

A society which bases its solidarity upon mens need to huddle

together in mutual protection against the forces of the jungle has
its uses, but it can scarcely claim a loyalty beyond the
consideration of self-interestor beyond what it can impose
through fear of the law and of the police. This is the social
contract upon which modern societies are based, including the
dictatorships (for the sheep will sometimes look to the wolf for
protection). And, since few are likely to be mystics and only a
minority can draw adequate spiritual support from private religion
(that is to say, a religion which is con-fined to the personal realm
and does not permeate the whole of a society, a community or a
tribe), the majority of those who live in a profane society remain
imprisoned in a very cold and narrow place.

It is because such a caged life as this can only be a life starved of

realities for which man has an inherent hunger that the rebel and
the misfit assume a role of peculiar importance in modern society
and exercise such a fascination over contemporary artists and
novelists, while satyr and nymphomaniac, drunkard and drugaddict become significant figureshowever tormented and
unsatisfiedin the drama of release from a prison too humdrum to
be tolerated, bearing witness on the one hand to the fact that
sexuality provides a compelling real experience, whatever its
context, and, on the other, to the not unreason-able view that an
illusion of escape is preferable to no escape at all. Those among
the good prisoners who are too sophisticated to thunder moral
denunciations now dismiss sexual obsession as boring and
addiction as a sickness. But when it comes to offering an

alternative they can only suggest that the would-be escaper

should try to become a trusty.

What the traditional, God-centred societies offered their members

was a life saturated with the awareness of realities beyond the
reach of mind, feeling or sense in terms of their normal
functioninga life of ignorance and superstition, as the trusties
sayand a whole complex of bridges leading to hillock or
mountain, as the case might be, but certainly leading upwards
and outwards from the flatlands. Objects of sense were alive with
symbolism, emotion was universalised in ritual and mental
concepts were not self-sufficient propositions (enclosing and
limiting reality), but keys to supernatural knowledge.

In earlier times, says Thibon, men did not know all the contours of
the human and cosmic lock, but they possessed the key . . .
Modern thought as a whole no longer occupies itself at all with
the nature or existence of this key. The only questions posed
before a closed door is to examine it most painstakingly, not to
open it.[1] Or else we ignore the door altogether (taking it for a
section of an impenetrable wall) and set the key under a
microscope, treating the instrument that lies in our hands as
though it were an end in itself.

This is not far from being a definition of idolatryto worship a key

instead of setting it to the lock. And here we come to the great
divide which separates rationalism and all its offshoots from the
traditional view of ideas, feelings and the phenomena of the
physical world as symbols and therefore as signs which, if they are
properly used, point towards the perfection which, in their
flickering fashion, they signify. We shall show them Our signs on

the horizon and within themselves, until it is clear to them that this
is the Truth.[2]

But to live with things that are other than they seem, among signs
that point away from themselves, amidst bridges that lead
elsewhere and ladders of which only the lower rungs are visible is
hard for those who hunger after factual certainties. It is easier to
settle down where we are and regard the sign as a work of art,
the bridge as a piece of masonry and the ladder as a wooden
frame, accepting appearances for what they are worth and
trying to forget that death willso far as we are concerned
dissolve all such works into nothingness.

Primordial man sees the more in the less, says Schuon. The
infrahuman world in fact reflects the heavens and transmits in an
existential language a divine message that is at once multiple and
unique.[3] Christianity, he points out, could not but react against
the real paganism in the environment within which it crystallised
as a world religion, but in so doing it also destroyed values which
did not in the least merit the reproach of paganism : modern
technology is but an end product, no doubt very indirect, of a
perspective which, after having banished the gods and genies
from nature and having rendered it profane, by this very fact
finally made possible its profanation in the most brutal sense of
this word.

Paganism in the proper sense of the term is an idolatry applied to

the natural world, but it is also, in most cases, the debris of a
religion in the final stage of decay, the stage at which its followers,
like dogs, sniff at the pointed finger rather than going where the

finger points. Paganism is idolatry, animism, fetishism and so on;

and these aberrations all bear witness to the fact that something
which was once adored as a symbol of the reality which lay
behind its fragile presence has come to be worshipped for its own
sake. But every religion is likely eventually to degenerate into
paganism if the world lasts long enough. It follows that the
distinction between images which are adored as symbols and
images which are worshipped as gods is hard to make; in any
religious contextand particularly in that of Hinduism, to take one
examplethere will be those who understand that the image
points away from itself and those who mistake the image for an
end in itself.

A new Divine Revelation, breaking in upon the rusty structure of

the particular milieu to which it is directed, is likely to sweep such
images aside. It offers a real and effective alternativea highroad
in place of the little bridges and ladders that people had been
using (or misusing) for ages past. But when the highroad itself has
begun to suffer the erosion of time and when (this being the
nature of times action) it has narrowed and contracted, then the
loss is felt. Once the highroad has gone out of sight, so far as the
majority of people are concerned, no bridge is to be despised, no
ladder scorned as primitive, naive or clumsy. It is, in any case,
one thing for the lightning stroke to destroy such supports and
quite another for busy, opinionated little men to set themselves up
as wreckers.

Islam and Christianity were both, at their inception, revolutionary

religions and therefore destructiveat least in a certain sense.
Since it is that section of the world which was formerly Christian
that has imposed its own pattern almost universally, ex-Christians
are the wreckers with whom we must be chiefly concerned. And
all Westerners who are not Christians are ex-Christians, whether

they like it or not: a heritage cannot easily be shaken off, and the
fiercest opponents of Christianity are those who reject God for not
Himself being a Christian (as they understand the term). The
destructiveness which was once no more than a side-effect of a
great act of renewal turns sour and vicious in those for whom the
blazing certainty of Gods love and of Christs redemptive
sacrifice have no meaning. The rose, in decay, stinks.

In a certain sense the world is nothing but a tissue of bridges, and

in theory it is open to any man to recognise sticks and stones for
what they really are and so to find himself in a Paradise that was
never finally lost. For him, no doubt, the universeso opaque, so
darkened in this winter seasonis still transparent as it is said to
have been when it issued from the hand of God, and prison bars
are no more than candy-sticks that snap in a childs grip; perhaps
there will always be such freaks, born out of their time, since time is
not absolute and must sometimes be mocked. But this is not for us.
The things we handle are dark and heavy, the bars are thick, and
age wears us out. We need crutches and cannot afford to be too
proud to accept them from the hands of men no better than
ourselves. With them, we may hope to hobble over such rickety
bridges as remain undestroyed.

What does a cripple feel, with fire or flood behind him and a
jostling crowd making for the only exit, if someone wantonly
knocks his crutch away and then destroys the bridge that led to
safety? Rage, surely. And if men knew what they have lost through
the well-intentioned activities of the crutch-snatchers and bridgedestroyers their rage would make the anger of warring armies and
revolutionary mobs seem kittenish.

The principal function of Western thought has been, over a long

period, the destruction of superstition, a term whichthough it
may sometimes be applied only to little habits and rituals which
have survived in isolation from the doctrines in terms of which they
once made sensesoon expands to include every form of belief
in the supernatural or in any reality beyond the reach of our
senses. Bridges, ladders and also the highroads provided by the
great religions have at least one thing in common : they are
invisible to those in whom this belief has been destroyed. It is
difficult to measure wickedness and define its degrees, but those
who have set themselves to persuade their fellow men that the
world is nothing but a meaningless agglomeration of material
particles (or a blind interaction of minute quanta of energy) totally
separate from mans inner being have done a thing beside which
no massacre of the innocents can stand comparison. Like the
former Commandant of Auschwitz, these destroyers of bridges
have, for the most part, been well-behaved, keeping their fingers
off their neighbours goods and their neighbours wives: and this,
as much as anything, makes current notions of goodness and
morality seem infantile. If those who do the most harm go
unpunished, how can we bring ourselves to condemn the thief
and the murderer?

But if wickedness can be definedas it may bein terms of a

half-witted pursuit of good, a pursuit without regard for time, place
or circumstance, then it must be said that much of this wrecking
has been done in the name of the most splendid of ideals, the
ideal of perfection. And the idealist, the perfectionist, cannot
tolerate what is grimy or flawed or broken. He must change it at
once or, if it cannot be changed, he must destroy it. But our world
is by definition and by necessity a grimy, flawed and broken
place, subject to decay and riddled with death. If it were
otherwise it would not be the world orto put the matter another
waythis universe of time and space would be indistinguishable

from the timeless perfection of Paradise and would therefore lose

its separate existence. It can be rendered transparent, so that the
light of what is perfect is discerned behind its shapes and patterns,
and it can be loved so that its very deformities become the
objects of a redeeming passion, but it cannot be changed or
mended at its own level.

At the root of modern idealism, with its refusal to accept

imperfection as something inherent in the human condition, there
lies a basic and perhaps satanic puritanism which, carried to its
logical conclusion, would set fire to this world of ours and destroy it
utterly.

You can work miracles, said one of his companions to the

Muslim saint, Hallaj; Can you bring me an apple from heaven?
The saint raised his hand and, within the instant, held in it an apple
which he offered to his companion. Biting into the fruit, the man
observed with horror that there was a worm in it. That, said
Hallaj, is because, in passing from the eternal realm into the world
of time it has taken on something of the latters corruptibility.

This story has a particular bearing upon contemporary attitudes to

such traditional and religious bridges as still remain relatively intact
in the modern world. When they are not being undermined by the
scientific view, they are being condemned on account of the
corruption which has infiltrated their structure; or, indeed,
undermining may go hand-in-hand with condemnation so that
they suffer the combined assault of rationalist and moralist. The
man who is ready enough to admit his own imperfections and to
acknowledge that evil cannot be eradicated from the conditions
of human life may still seek for a kind of primordial purity in religion
and primordial virtue in its priests or exponents, demanding that

apples from heaven should forever retain the incorruptibility of

their origin. As a fallen being himself, he might be expected to
know better.

Whatever is fleshed must in some measure take on the limitations

of its medium and become subject to the laws which govern the
context of its incarnation. A Divine Revelation, fleshed in
concepts, in an organisation, in rituals and in rules of conduct,
cannot be immune to the process of limitation and decay, even
though the grace and power which lie at the kernel of its
manifestation remain by their nature untainted as does the
ultimate and innermost essence of man himself. And because we
are what we are and the world is what it is, grace and power can
be tapped only by those who have enough love and humility in
them to embrace the outer shell, twisted as it has been by so
many human hands and crusted with the grime of centuries, until,
like the fairy tale Princess who, by a kiss, changes a misshapen
monster into a fair young Prince, they find what was always there,
in the kernel, at the centre, only waiting to be re-awakened. And
from this point of view the shortcomings of any religion as it
appears to the outsider and the scandal created by some of its
representativesfornicating priests, corrupt Imams, thieving
Sadhusmight be compared to the trials and tests which the
heroes of mythology had to surmount before they reached the
goal of all desire.

From another point of view it might be said that if religious

institutions (and the ritual and mythological complexes of
primitive peoples) did not reek of humanity, they would perhaps
seem too alien, too abstract and, indeed, too pure for the likes of
us. It is because they are so well integrated into our natural and
organic existence and because they have a homely, familiar
smell that they are of use as bridges over which ordinary people

may pass from this shore to the other, unfamiliar one. And this is
what the puritan, intoxicated with his own idealism, cannot admit :
he finds it intolerable that plaster saints and household gods and
desert tombs should serve as bridges and that a God who is said
to be almighty and transcendent should so demean Himself as to
permit his grace and power to operate through such trivial
instruments, forgetting that this same God is also said to be
omnipresent, that nothing therefore is trivial and that men are free
to find Him where they can.

The Divine Presence within thingsin sticks and stones and bits
and piecesimplies their wholeness, but men who are themselves
fragmented between mind, emotion and sense cannot hope to
recognise this wholeness (except as an idea). And in the
idealists disgust and alienation, his refusal to stoop and make use
of small, imperfect things lies one of the primary betrayals of mans
viceregality. For the Viceroy is a builder of bridges, and these men
are concerned only to destroy. Obsessed by ideas of neatness
and symmetry, they take their scissors and snip away at the world
picture like a child who, when he tries to make his cut-out figure
perfectly symmetrical, cuts first on one side, then on the other
andstill unable to get it rightgoes on until nothing is left. They
seek a false perfection and an impossible symmetry through a
process of reduction. All that does not fit must be eliminated.
But, in the long run, nothing fits their categories. Everything must
go.

The explanation of the world by a series of reductions has an aim

in view: to rid the world of extra-mundane values. It is a systematic
banalisation of the world undertaken for the purpose of
conquering and mastering it. But the conquest of the world is
notin any case was not till half a century agothe purpose of all
human societies. It is an idiosyncrasy of Western man.[4]

Against this is to be set the vast, untidy bulk of all that man can be
and know and do, sprawling across a creation open to the four
quarters. The frontiers of what is knowable then extend to the
furthest limits of creation and beyond, but the frontiers of what
can be comprehended, defined and explained in rational terms
and within the contours of the mental faculty are narrowed. The
safety of little, day-to-day certainties and the comfort of seeing a
needle on a dial move as it was expected to move must be
sacrificed before we can escape the closed circle of our own
limited existence and enjoy what we are free to enjoy.

But if what is ultimately knowable cannot be cut down to size and

explained in the common language of our kind, it can in some
measure be lived and acted outin stories, in symbols and in
ritesso that things fall into place, the local is related to the
universal and the scattered fragments of our existence are reassembled into a whole that makes sense.

NOTES

[1] Echelle de Jacob : Gustav Thibon, p. 177.

[2] Quran, 41.53.

[3] Images de l'Esprit : Frithjof Schuon (Flammarion) pp. 15-16.

[4] The Two and the One : Mircea Eliade (Harwell Press). pp. 156157.