Traditional Quotes and Symbols
Traditional civilizations, despite their inevitable imperfections, are like sea walls built to stem the rising tide of worldliness, error, subversion, of the fall that is ceaselessly renewed.
When the modern world is contrasted with traditional civilizations, it is not simply a question of looking on each side for what is good and bad; since good and evil are everywhere, it is essentially a question of knowing on which side the lesser evil is to be found. If someone tells us that such and such a good exists outside tradition, we respond: no doubt, but it is necessary to choose the most important good, and this is necessarily represented by tradition; and if someone tells us that in tradition there exists such and such an evil, we respond: no doubt, but it is necessary to choose the lesser evil, and again it is tradition that contains it. It is illogical to prefer an evil that involves some benefits to a good that involves some evils. Certainly, to confine oneself to admiring the traditional worlds is still to stop short at a fragmentary point of view, for every civilization is a “two-edged sword”; it is a total good only by virtue of those invisible elements that determine it positively. In certain respects, every human society is bad; if its transcendent character is entirely removed—which amounts to dehumanizing it since the element of transcendence is essential to man though always dependent upon his free consent— then at the same time society’s entire reason for being is removed, and there remains only an ant heap in no way superior to any other ant heap since the needs of life and thus the right to life remain everywhere the same, whether it is a question of men or insects. It is one of the most pernicious of errors to believe that the human collectivity, on the one hand, or its well-being, on the other, represents an unconditional or absolute value and thus an end in itself.
Regarded as social phenomena and independently of their
intrinsic value—though there is no sharp dividing line between the two—traditional civilizations, despite their inevitable
imperfections, are like sea walls built to stem the rising tide of worldliness, error, subversion, of the fall that is ceaselessly renewed; this fall is more and more invasive, but it will be conquered in its turn by the final irruption of divine fire, the very fire of which the traditions are, and always have been, the earthly crystallizations. To reject traditional frameworks because of human abuses amounts to asserting that the founders of religion did not know what they were doing, that abuses are not inherent in human nature, that they are therefore avoidable even in societies numbering millions of men, and that they are avoidable thanks to purely human means; no more flagrant contradiction than this could be imagined.
Traditional civilizations, despite their inevitable imperfections, are like sea walls built to stem the rising tide of worldliness, error, subversion, of the fall that is ceaselessly renewed.
When the modern world is contrasted with traditional civilizations, it is not simply a question of looking on each side for what is good and bad; since good and evil are everywhere, it is essentially a question of knowing on which side the lesser evil is to be found. If someone tells us that such and such a good exists outside tradition, we respond: no doubt, but it is necessary to choose the most important good, and this is necessarily represented by tradition; and if someone tells us that in tradition there exists such and such an evil, we respond: no doubt, but it is necessary to choose the lesser evil, and again it is tradition that contains it. It is illogical to prefer an evil that involves some benefits to a good that involves some evils. Certainly, to confine oneself to admiring the traditional worlds is still to stop short at a fragmentary point of view, for every civilization is a “two-edged sword”; it is a total good only by virtue of those invisible elements that determine it positively. In certain respects, every human society is bad; if its transcendent character is entirely removed—which amounts to dehumanizing it since the element of transcendence is essential to man though always dependent upon his free consent— then at the same time society’s entire reason for being is removed, and there remains only an ant heap in no way superior to any other ant heap since the needs of life and thus the right to life remain everywhere the same, whether it is a question of men or insects. It is one of the most pernicious of errors to believe that the human collectivity, on the one hand, or its well-being, on the other, represents an unconditional or absolute value and thus an end in itself.
Regarded as social phenomena and independently of their
intrinsic value—though there is no sharp dividing line between the two—traditional civilizations, despite their inevitable
imperfections, are like sea walls built to stem the rising tide of worldliness, error, subversion, of the fall that is ceaselessly renewed; this fall is more and more invasive, but it will be conquered in its turn by the final irruption of divine fire, the very fire of which the traditions are, and always have been, the earthly crystallizations. To reject traditional frameworks because of human abuses amounts to asserting that the founders of religion did not know what they were doing, that abuses are not inherent in human nature, that they are therefore avoidable even in societies numbering millions of men, and that they are avoidable thanks to purely human means; no more flagrant contradiction than this could be imagined.