Miracles in the usual sense of the word are in effect only particular variants of the initial— and everywhere present—miracle that is the fact of existence.

Independently of doctrinal atheism and cultural particularities,

modern man moves through the world as if Existence were nothing or as if he had invented it; it is for him a commonplace thing like the dust beneath his feet—more especially as he is no longer aware of the Principle at once transcendent and immanent—and he makes use of it with assurance and inadvertence in a life that has lost its sacredness and thus become meaningless. Everything is conceived through a web of contingencies, relationships, prejudices; no phenomenon is any longer considered in itself, in its being, and grasped at its root; the contingent has usurped the rank of the absolute; man scarcely reasons any more except in terms of his imagination, which is falsified by ideologies on the one hand and by his artificial surroundings on the other. Now eschatological doctrines, however exaggerated they may appear to the sensibilities of those whose only gospel is their materialism and dissipation and whose life is nothing but a flight before God, provide the true measure for the cosmic situation of man; what the Revelations ask of us and what Heaven imposes or inflicts on us is what we are in reality, regardless of our own opinion; we know it in our heart of hearts, if only we can detach ourselves a little from the monstrous accumulation of false images that have become entrenched in our mind. What we need is to become once again capable of grasping the value of Existence and, amid the multitude of phenomena, the meaning of man; we must once again find the measure of the real. Our reactions to eschatological doctrines—or to the one that concerns us most—are the measure of our understanding of man.

 

There is something in man which is able to conceive the Absolute and even attain to it and which therefore is absolute. This being the case, one can assess the extent of the aberration of those for whom it seems perfectly natural to have the right or chance to be man, but who wish to be so without participating in the integral nature of man and the attitudes it implies. Needless to say, the paradoxical possibility of denying itself is also a part of this nature—for to be man is to be free in a “relatively absolute” sense—much in the same way as to accept error or throw oneself into an abyss is a human possibility.

 

We have already said that “unbelievers” no longer have the

sense of either nothingness or existence, that they no longer know the value of existence and never look at it in relation to the nothingness from which it is miraculously detached. Miracles in the usual sense of the word are in effect only particular variants of the initial— and everywhere present—miracle that is the fact of existence; the miraculous and divine are everywhere; it is the human outlook that is absent.

 

Fundamentally there are only three miracles: existence, life,

intelligence; with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite.

 

 

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Frithjof Schuon: Light on the Ancient Worlds

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