Traditional Quotes and Symbols
What counts, for Revelation, is the efficacy of the symbolism and not the indefinite knowledge of meaningless facts.
It is a great temptation to attribute the apparent naivety of the Holy Scriptures to the "human margin", stretched out as it is in the shadow of Divine inspiration; it goes without saying that there is no connection between the two, unless we take this margin in a transposed and altogether different way, as we will do later, but it is clearly no such transposition that modern critics have in view when they bring up as arguments against the sacred books the apparent scientific errors which they contain.
The data - said to be naive – of Genesis for example prove, not that the Bible is wrong, but that man ought not to be told any more; needless to say, no knowledge is harmful in itself, and there are necessarily always men who are capable of spiritually integrating all possible knowledge; but the only kinds of knowledge that the average man can cope with are those which come to him through elementary, universal, age-old and therefore normal experience, as the history of the last centuries clearly proves.
It is a fact not only that scientific man (rough-cast by classical Greece and developed by the modern West) loses religion in proportion to his involvement with physical science but also that the more he is thus involved, the more he closes himself to the infinite dimension of suprasensory knowledge - the very knowledge that gives life a meaning.
It is true that Paradise is described in the Scriptures as being "up above", "in Heaven", because the celestial vault is the only height that can be empirically or sensorially grasped; and for an analogous reason, hell is "down below", "under the earth", in darkness, heaviness, imprisonment. Similarly, for the Asiatics, samsaric rebirths (when they are neither celestial nor infernal) take place "on earth", that is, on the only plane that can be empirically grasped; what counts, for Revelation, is the efficacy of the symbolism and not the indefinite knowledge of meaningless facts. It is true that no fact is totally meaningless in itself, otherwise it would be nonexistent, but the innumerable facts which escape man's normal experience and which the scientific viewpoint accumulates in our consciousness and also in our life are only spiritually intelligible for those who have no need of them.
Ancient man was extremely sensitive to the intentions inherent in symbolic expressions, as is proved on the one hand by the efficacy of these expressions throughout the centuries and on the other hand by the fact that ancient man was a perfectly intelligent being, as everything goes to show; when he was told the story of Adam and Eve, he grasped so well what it was all about - the truth of it is in fact dazzlingly clear - that he did not dream of wondering "why" or "how"; for we carry the story of Paradise and the Fall in our soul and even in our flesh.
The same applies to all eschatological symbolism: the "eternity" of the hereafter denotes first of all a contrast in relation to what is here below, a dimension of absoluteness as opposed to our world of fleeting and therefore "vain" contingencies, and it is this and nothing else that matters here, and this is the divine intention that lies behind the image. In transmigrationist symbolisms, on the contrary, this "vanity" is extended also to the hereafter, at least in a certain measure and by reason of a profound difference of perspective; and here likewise there is no preoccupation with either "why" or "how", once the penetrating intention of the symbol has been grasped as it were in one's own flesh.
In the man who is marked by the viewpoint of modern science, intuition of the underlying intentions has vanished, and that is not all; modern science, axiomatically closed to the suprasensory dimensions of the Real, has endowed man with a crass ignorance and thereby warped his imagination.
The modernist mentality is bent on reducing angels, devils, miracles (in a word all non-material phenomena which are inexplicable in material terms) to the domain of the "subjective" and the "psychological", when there is not the slightest connection between the two, except that the psychic itself is also made - but objectively - of substance which lies beyond matter; a contemporary theologian, speaking of the Ascension, has gone so far as to ask slyly, "where does this cosmic journey end?", which serves to measure out the self-satisfied imbecility of a certain mentality that wants to be "of our time". It would be easy to explain why Christ was "carried up" into the air and what is the meaning of the "cloud" which hid him from sight, and also why it was said that Christ "will come after the same fashion"; every detail corresponds to a precise reality which can easily be understood in the light of the traditional cosmologies; the key lies in the fact that the passage from one cosmic degree to another is heralded in the lower degree by "technically" necessary and symbolically meaningful circumstances which reflect after their fashion the higher state and which follow one another in the order required by the nature of things.
In any case, the deficiency of modern science lies essentially in its neglect of universal causality; it will no doubt be objected that science is not concerned with philosophical causality but with phenomena, which is untrue, for evolutionism in its entirety is nothing other than a hypertrophy, thought out as a means of denying real causes, and this materialistic negation, together with its evolutionist compensation, belongs to philosophy and not to science.
From an altogether different point of view, it must be admitted that the progressives are not entirely wrong in thinking that there is something in religion which no longer works; in fact the individualistic and sentimental argumentation with which traditional piety operates has lost almost all its power to pierce consciences, and the reason for this is not merely that modern man is irreligious but also that the usual religious arguments, through not probing sufficiently to the depths of things and not having had previously any need to do so, are psychologically somewhat outworn and fail to satisfycertain needs of causality.
If human societies degenerate on the one hand with the passage of time, they accumulate on the other hand experience by virtue of old age, however intermingled with errors their experience may be; this paradox is something that any pastoral teaching bent on efficacy should take into account, not by drawing new directives from the general error but on the contrary by using arguments of a higher order, intellectual rather than sentimental; as a result, some at least would be saved (a greater number than one might be tempted to suppose) whereas the demagogic scientistic pastoralist saves no one.
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Frithjof Schuon: Islam and the Perennial Philosophy
What counts, for Revelation, is the efficacy of the symbolism and not the indefinite knowledge of meaningless facts.
It is a great temptation to attribute the apparent naivety of the Holy Scriptures to the "human margin", stretched out as it is in the shadow of Divine inspiration; it goes without saying that there is no connection between the two, unless we take this margin in a transposed and altogether different way, as we will do later, but it is clearly no such transposition that modern critics have in view when they bring up as arguments against the sacred books the apparent scientific errors which they contain.
The data - said to be naive – of Genesis for example prove, not that the Bible is wrong, but that man ought not to be told any more; needless to say, no knowledge is harmful in itself, and there are necessarily always men who are capable of spiritually integrating all possible knowledge; but the only kinds of knowledge that the average man can cope with are those which come to him through elementary, universal, age-old and therefore normal experience, as the history of the last centuries clearly proves.
It is a fact not only that scientific man (rough-cast by classical Greece and developed by the modern West) loses religion in proportion to his involvement with physical science but also that the more he is thus involved, the more he closes himself to the infinite dimension of suprasensory knowledge - the very knowledge that gives life a meaning.
It is true that Paradise is described in the Scriptures as being "up above", "in Heaven", because the celestial vault is the only height that can be empirically or sensorially grasped; and for an analogous reason, hell is "down below", "under the earth", in darkness, heaviness, imprisonment. Similarly, for the Asiatics, samsaric rebirths (when they are neither celestial nor infernal) take place "on earth", that is, on the only plane that can be empirically grasped; what counts, for Revelation, is the efficacy of the symbolism and not the indefinite knowledge of meaningless facts. It is true that no fact is totally meaningless in itself, otherwise it would be nonexistent, but the innumerable facts which escape man's normal experience and which the scientific viewpoint accumulates in our consciousness and also in our life are only spiritually intelligible for those who have no need of them.
Ancient man was extremely sensitive to the intentions inherent in symbolic expressions, as is proved on the one hand by the efficacy of these expressions throughout the centuries and on the other hand by the fact that ancient man was a perfectly intelligent being, as everything goes to show; when he was told the story of Adam and Eve, he grasped so well what it was all about - the truth of it is in fact dazzlingly clear - that he did not dream of wondering "why" or "how"; for we carry the story of Paradise and the Fall in our soul and even in our flesh.
The same applies to all eschatological symbolism: the "eternity" of the hereafter denotes first of all a contrast in relation to what is here below, a dimension of absoluteness as opposed to our world of fleeting and therefore "vain" contingencies, and it is this and nothing else that matters here, and this is the divine intention that lies behind the image. In transmigrationist symbolisms, on the contrary, this "vanity" is extended also to the hereafter, at least in a certain measure and by reason of a profound difference of perspective; and here likewise there is no preoccupation with either "why" or "how", once the penetrating intention of the symbol has been grasped as it were in one's own flesh.
In the man who is marked by the viewpoint of modern science, intuition of the underlying intentions has vanished, and that is not all; modern science, axiomatically closed to the suprasensory dimensions of the Real, has endowed man with a crass ignorance and thereby warped his imagination.
The modernist mentality is bent on reducing angels, devils, miracles (in a word all non-material phenomena which are inexplicable in material terms) to the domain of the "subjective" and the "psychological", when there is not the slightest connection between the two, except that the psychic itself is also made - but objectively - of substance which lies beyond matter; a contemporary theologian, speaking of the Ascension, has gone so far as to ask slyly, "where does this cosmic journey end?", which serves to measure out the self-satisfied imbecility of a certain mentality that wants to be "of our time". It would be easy to explain why Christ was "carried up" into the air and what is the meaning of the "cloud" which hid him from sight, and also why it was said that Christ "will come after the same fashion"; every detail corresponds to a precise reality which can easily be understood in the light of the traditional cosmologies; the key lies in the fact that the passage from one cosmic degree to another is heralded in the lower degree by "technically" necessary and symbolically meaningful circumstances which reflect after their fashion the higher state and which follow one another in the order required by the nature of things.
In any case, the deficiency of modern science lies essentially in its neglect of universal causality; it will no doubt be objected that science is not concerned with philosophical causality but with phenomena, which is untrue, for evolutionism in its entirety is nothing other than a hypertrophy, thought out as a means of denying real causes, and this materialistic negation, together with its evolutionist compensation, belongs to philosophy and not to science.
From an altogether different point of view, it must be admitted that the progressives are not entirely wrong in thinking that there is something in religion which no longer works; in fact the individualistic and sentimental argumentation with which traditional piety operates has lost almost all its power to pierce consciences, and the reason for this is not merely that modern man is irreligious but also that the usual religious arguments, through not probing sufficiently to the depths of things and not having had previously any need to do so, are psychologically somewhat outworn and fail to satisfycertain needs of causality.
If human societies degenerate on the one hand with the passage of time, they accumulate on the other hand experience by virtue of old age, however intermingled with errors their experience may be; this paradox is something that any pastoral teaching bent on efficacy should take into account, not by drawing new directives from the general error but on the contrary by using arguments of a higher order, intellectual rather than sentimental; as a result, some at least would be saved (a greater number than one might be tempted to suppose) whereas the demagogic scientistic pastoralist saves no one.
----
Frithjof Schuon: Islam and the Perennial Philosophy