Traditional Quotes and Symbols
There can be no accommodation between the traditional spirit and the modern spirit, any concession made to the latter being necessarily at the the expense of the former
There can really be no accommodation between the traditional spirit and the modern spirit, any concession made to the latter being necessarily at the the expense of the former, since the modern spirit consists fundamentally in the direct negation of everything that constitutes the traditional spirit. The truth is that the modern spirit implies in all who are affected by it in any degree a real hatred of what is secret, and of whatever seems to come more or less near to being secret, in any and every domain.
In the end, the real secret, the only secret than can never be betrayed in any way, resides uniquely in the inexpressible, which is by the same token incommunicable, every truth of a transcendent order necessarily partaking of the inexpressible; and it is essentially in this fact that the profound significance of the initiatic secret really lies, for no kind of exterior secret can ever have any value except as an image or symbol of the initiatic secret, though it may occasionally also be not unprofitable as a ‘discipline’.
But it must be understood that these are things of which the meaning and the range are completely lost to the modern mentality, and incomprehension of them quite naturally engenders hostility; besides, the ordinary man always has an instinctive fear of what he does not understand, and fear engenders hatred only too easily, even when a mere direct denial of the uncomprehended truth is adopted as a means of escape from fear; indeed, some such denials are more like real screams of rage, for instance those of the self-styled ‘free-thinkers’ with regard to everything connected with religion.
The hatred of secrecy is basically nothing but one of the forms of the hatred for anything that surpasses the level of the ‘average’, as well as for everything that holds aloof from the uniformity which it is sought to impose on everyone. Nevertheless, there is, within the modern world itself, a secret that is better kept than any other: it is that of the formidable enterprise of suggestion that has produced and that maintains the existing mentality, that has constituted it and as it were ‘manufactured’ it in such a way that it can only deny the existence and even the possibility of any such enterprise; and this is doubtless the best conceivable means, and a means of truly ‘diabolical’ cleverness, for ensuring that the secret shall never be discovered.
Rationalism, being the denial of every principle superior to reason, brings with it as a ‘practical’ consequence the exclusive use of reason, but of reason blinded, so to speak, by the very fact that it has been isolated from the pure and transcendent intellect, of which, normally and legitimately, it can only reflect the light in the individual domain.
As soon as it has lost all effective communication with the supra-individual intellect, reason cannot but tend more and more toward the lowest level, toward the inferior pole of existence, plunging ever more deeply into ‘materiality’; as this tendency grows, it gradually loses hold of the very idea of truth, and arrives at the point of seeking no goal other than that of making things as easy as possible for its own limited comprehension, and in this it finds an immediate satisfaction in the very fact thafits own downward tendency leads it in the direction of the simplification and uniformization of all things; it submits all the more readily and speedily to this tendency because the results of this submission conform to its desires, and its ever more rapid descent cannot fail to lead at last to what has been called the ‘reign of quantity’.
It is a work that obviously could not be made effective all at once, although perhaps the most astonishing thing of all is the speed with which it has been possible to induce Westerners to forget everything connected with the existence of a traditional civilization in their countries; if one thinks of the total incomprehension of the Middle Ages and everything connected with them which became apparent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it becomes easy to understand that so complete and abrupt a change cannot have come about in a natural and spontaneous way. However that may be, the first task was as it were to confine men within the limits of their own individuality, and this was the task of rationalism, as previously explained, for rationalism denies to the being the possession or use of any faculty of a transcendent order; it goes without saying moreover that rationalism began its work before ever it was known by that name, and before it took on its more especially philosophical form, as has been shown in connection with Protestantism; and besides, the ‘humanism’ of the Renaissance was no more than the direct precursor of rationalism properly so called, for the very word ‘humanism’ implies a pretension to bring everything down to purely human elements and thus (at least in practice if not yet by virtue of an expressly formulated theory) to exclude everything of a supraindividual order.
Materialism merely survives for its own sake, and no doubt it may well survive a good deal longer, especially in the form of ‘practical materialism’, but in any case, it has ceased henceforth to play the principal part in anti-traditional action.
After having enclosed the corporeal world as completely as possible, it was necessary, while guarding against the re-establishment of any communication with superior domains, to open it up again from below, so as to allow the dissolving and destructive forces of the inferior subtle domain to penetrate into it.
The word ‘satanic’ can indeed be properly applied to all negation and reversal of order, such as is so incontestably in evidence in everything we now see around us: is the modern world really anything whatever but a direct denial of all traditional truth?
At the same time, and more or less of necessity, the spirit of negation is the spirit of lying; it wears every disguise, often the most unexpected, in order to avoid being recognized for what it is, and even in order to pass itself off as the very opposite of what it is; this is where counterfeit comes in; and this is the moment to recall that it is said that ‘Satan is the ape of God’, and also that he ‘transfigures himself into an angel of light’.
In the end, this amounts to saying that he imitates in his own way, by altering and falsifying it so as always to make it serve his own ends, the very thing he sets out to oppose: thus, he will so manage matters that disorder takes on the appearance of a false order, he will hide the negation of all principle under the affirmation of false principles, and so on. Naturally, nothing of that kind can ever really be more than dissimulation and even caricature, but it is presented cleverly enough to induce an immense majority of men to allow themselves to be deceived by it; and why should we be astonished at this, when it is so easy to observe both the extent to which trickery, even of the crudest sort, succeeds in imposing itself on the crowd, and also the difficulty of subsequently undeceiving them?
Vulgus vult decipi (common people love to be deceived) was already a saying of the ancients of the ‘classical period’, and no doubt there have always been people, though never as many as in our days, ready to add: ergo decipiatur (so deceive them)!
Excerpts from:
René Guénon - The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times
There can be no accommodation between the traditional spirit and the modern spirit, any concession made to the latter being necessarily at the the expense of the former
There can really be no accommodation between the traditional spirit and the modern spirit, any concession made to the latter being necessarily at the the expense of the former, since the modern spirit consists fundamentally in the direct negation of everything that constitutes the traditional spirit. The truth is that the modern spirit implies in all who are affected by it in any degree a real hatred of what is secret, and of whatever seems to come more or less near to being secret, in any and every domain.
In the end, the real secret, the only secret than can never be betrayed in any way, resides uniquely in the inexpressible, which is by the same token incommunicable, every truth of a transcendent order necessarily partaking of the inexpressible; and it is essentially in this fact that the profound significance of the initiatic secret really lies, for no kind of exterior secret can ever have any value except as an image or symbol of the initiatic secret, though it may occasionally also be not unprofitable as a ‘discipline’.
But it must be understood that these are things of which the meaning and the range are completely lost to the modern mentality, and incomprehension of them quite naturally engenders hostility; besides, the ordinary man always has an instinctive fear of what he does not understand, and fear engenders hatred only too easily, even when a mere direct denial of the uncomprehended truth is adopted as a means of escape from fear; indeed, some such denials are more like real screams of rage, for instance those of the self-styled ‘free-thinkers’ with regard to everything connected with religion.
The hatred of secrecy is basically nothing but one of the forms of the hatred for anything that surpasses the level of the ‘average’, as well as for everything that holds aloof from the uniformity which it is sought to impose on everyone. Nevertheless, there is, within the modern world itself, a secret that is better kept than any other: it is that of the formidable enterprise of suggestion that has produced and that maintains the existing mentality, that has constituted it and as it were ‘manufactured’ it in such a way that it can only deny the existence and even the possibility of any such enterprise; and this is doubtless the best conceivable means, and a means of truly ‘diabolical’ cleverness, for ensuring that the secret shall never be discovered.
Rationalism, being the denial of every principle superior to reason, brings with it as a ‘practical’ consequence the exclusive use of reason, but of reason blinded, so to speak, by the very fact that it has been isolated from the pure and transcendent intellect, of which, normally and legitimately, it can only reflect the light in the individual domain.
As soon as it has lost all effective communication with the supra-individual intellect, reason cannot but tend more and more toward the lowest level, toward the inferior pole of existence, plunging ever more deeply into ‘materiality’; as this tendency grows, it gradually loses hold of the very idea of truth, and arrives at the point of seeking no goal other than that of making things as easy as possible for its own limited comprehension, and in this it finds an immediate satisfaction in the very fact thafits own downward tendency leads it in the direction of the simplification and uniformization of all things; it submits all the more readily and speedily to this tendency because the results of this submission conform to its desires, and its ever more rapid descent cannot fail to lead at last to what has been called the ‘reign of quantity’.
It is a work that obviously could not be made effective all at once, although perhaps the most astonishing thing of all is the speed with which it has been possible to induce Westerners to forget everything connected with the existence of a traditional civilization in their countries; if one thinks of the total incomprehension of the Middle Ages and everything connected with them which became apparent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it becomes easy to understand that so complete and abrupt a change cannot have come about in a natural and spontaneous way. However that may be, the first task was as it were to confine men within the limits of their own individuality, and this was the task of rationalism, as previously explained, for rationalism denies to the being the possession or use of any faculty of a transcendent order; it goes without saying moreover that rationalism began its work before ever it was known by that name, and before it took on its more especially philosophical form, as has been shown in connection with Protestantism; and besides, the ‘humanism’ of the Renaissance was no more than the direct precursor of rationalism properly so called, for the very word ‘humanism’ implies a pretension to bring everything down to purely human elements and thus (at least in practice if not yet by virtue of an expressly formulated theory) to exclude everything of a supraindividual order.
Materialism merely survives for its own sake, and no doubt it may well survive a good deal longer, especially in the form of ‘practical materialism’, but in any case, it has ceased henceforth to play the principal part in anti-traditional action.
After having enclosed the corporeal world as completely as possible, it was necessary, while guarding against the re-establishment of any communication with superior domains, to open it up again from below, so as to allow the dissolving and destructive forces of the inferior subtle domain to penetrate into it.
The word ‘satanic’ can indeed be properly applied to all negation and reversal of order, such as is so incontestably in evidence in everything we now see around us: is the modern world really anything whatever but a direct denial of all traditional truth?
At the same time, and more or less of necessity, the spirit of negation is the spirit of lying; it wears every disguise, often the most unexpected, in order to avoid being recognized for what it is, and even in order to pass itself off as the very opposite of what it is; this is where counterfeit comes in; and this is the moment to recall that it is said that ‘Satan is the ape of God’, and also that he ‘transfigures himself into an angel of light’.
In the end, this amounts to saying that he imitates in his own way, by altering and falsifying it so as always to make it serve his own ends, the very thing he sets out to oppose: thus, he will so manage matters that disorder takes on the appearance of a false order, he will hide the negation of all principle under the affirmation of false principles, and so on. Naturally, nothing of that kind can ever really be more than dissimulation and even caricature, but it is presented cleverly enough to induce an immense majority of men to allow themselves to be deceived by it; and why should we be astonished at this, when it is so easy to observe both the extent to which trickery, even of the crudest sort, succeeds in imposing itself on the crowd, and also the difficulty of subsequently undeceiving them?
Vulgus vult decipi (common people love to be deceived) was already a saying of the ancients of the ‘classical period’, and no doubt there have always been people, though never as many as in our days, ready to add: ergo decipiatur (so deceive them)!
Excerpts from:
René Guénon - The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times