Traditional Quotes and Symbols
As soon as man is detached from his reason for existence, rooted in God, he can only slide downwards, in conformity with the law of gravity.
A proof which is often advanced in favor of religion, but which is rarely understood to its full extent, is the argument of the moral efficaciousness of Divine Legislation: indeed, what does human society become if it is deprived of a Law founded upon the authority of God?
The unbelievers, who as a general rule have but a highly restricted and partially false idea of human nature (otherwise they would not be unbelievers) will answer that it suffices to replace the religious Law with a civil Law founded upon the common interest; now the opinion of the "free thinkers" concerning the public good depends upon their scale of values, hence upon their idea of man and therefore of the meaning of life. But what has been instituted by an individual can always be abolished by another individual; philosophies change with tastes, they follow the downward slope of history, because as soon as man is detached from his reason for existence, rooted in God, he can only slide downwards, in conformity with the law of gravity which is valid for the human order as well as for the physical order, notwithstanding the periodic renewal effected by the religions, the sages and the saints.
Now the fact that the Divine Law, insofar as it is fundamental and thereby universal, is definitively the only efficacious one - to the degree that a Law can and must be so - this fact shows that it is a Message of Truth; it alone is incontestable and irreplaceable.
To be sure the contemporary world still possesses codes and civil laws, but even so for the general mentality there is less and less an authority which is such "by right", and not merely "in fact". Moreover, the Law is made to protect not only society, but also the individual prone to offense; if the "secular arm" inspires fear to the degree that badly intentioned men feel threatened by it, on the other hand these same men have no intrinsic motive not to follow their inclinations, outside the fear of God. The threat of human justice is uncertain, hence relative; that of the divine justice is absolute; for it is possible to escape men, but certainly not God.
In summary: one indirect proof of God is that without Divinity there is no authority, and without authority there is no efficacy; that is to say that the religious Message imposes itself - apart from its other imperatives - because no moral and social life is possible without it, except for a brief period which, without admitting it, is still living off the residues of a disavowed heritage.
And this brings us to another extrinsic proof a contrario of God, although it is fundamentally the same: it is a fact of experience that the common man, on the whole, who is not disciplined by social necessity and who precisely is only disciplined by religion and piety, decays in his behaviour as soon as he has no more religion containing and penetrating him; and experience proves that the disappearance of faith and of morals brings about that of personal dignity and of private life, which in fact only have meaning and value if man possesses an immortal soul.
It is hardly necessary to recall here that believing peasants and artisans are often of an aristocratic nature, and that they are so through religion; without forgetting that aristocracy in itself, namely nobility of sentiment and comportment and the tendency to control and transcend oneself, derives from spirituality and draws its principles from it, consciously or unconsciously.
What the people need in order to find a meaning in life, hence a possibility of earthly happiness, is religion and the crafts: religion because every man has need of it, and the crafts because they allow man to manifest his personality and to realize his vocation in the framework of a sapiential symbolism; every man loves intelligible work and work well done.
Now industrialism has robbed the people of both things: on the one hand of religion, denied by scientism from which industry derives, and rendered unlikely by the inhuman character of the mechanistic ambience, and on the other hand the crafts, replaced precisely by machinism; so much so that in spite of all the "social doctrines" of the Church and the nationalistic bourgeoisie, there is nothing left for the people which can give a meaning to their life and make them happy.
The classic contradiction of traditional Catholicism is to want to maintain the social hierarchy, in which it is theoretically right, even while accepting whole-heartedly (as an acquisition of the "Christian civilization" which in fact has long been abolished) the scientism and the machinism which precisely compromise this hierarchy by cutting the people off, in fact, from humankind.
The inverse error is founded on the same cult of technology, with the difference that it is detrimental to the bourgeoisie rather than to the common people and that it aims at reducing the entire society to mechanistic inhumanity while on the other hand presenting it with an "opium" made of bitterness and frigidity which kills the very organ of happiness; for to be happy it is necessary to be a child, happiness being made of gratitude and confidence, humanly speaking.
The machine is opposed to man, consequently it is also opposed to God; in a world where it poses as norm, it abolishes both the human and the divine. The logical solution to the problem would be the return (which in fact has become impossible without a divine intervention) to the crafts and at the same time to religion – and thereby to an ambience which, by not falsifying our sense of the real, does not make unlikely what is evident.
One of the greatest successes of the devil was to create around man surroundings in which God and immortality appear unbelievable. (And this certainly is not, in spite of all illusions, "Christian civilization".)
(It will undoubtedly be objected that the Church could not compromise itself by opposing that "irreversible" phenomenon which is industrialism; we would reply first of all that the truth has precedence over any consideration of opportuneness or of "irreversibility", and then that the Church could always have affirmed its doctrinal position, to all intents and purposes, without having to be unrealistic on the level of facts; it could moreover have opted, with perfect logic and in accord with its entire past, for the monarchist and traditional right-wing which upheld it by definition, without having to compromise itself in the eyes of some, with the ambiguous "right" born in the XIXth century in the shadow of the machine.)
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Excerpt from the Divine to the Human by Frithjof Schuon
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image: The Facundus Codex - illustration for Rev 8:7-8
As soon as man is detached from his reason for existence, rooted in God, he can only slide downwards, in conformity with the law of gravity.
A proof which is often advanced in favor of religion, but which is rarely understood to its full extent, is the argument of the moral efficaciousness of Divine Legislation: indeed, what does human society become if it is deprived of a Law founded upon the authority of God?
The unbelievers, who as a general rule have but a highly restricted and partially false idea of human nature (otherwise they would not be unbelievers) will answer that it suffices to replace the religious Law with a civil Law founded upon the common interest; now the opinion of the "free thinkers" concerning the public good depends upon their scale of values, hence upon their idea of man and therefore of the meaning of life. But what has been instituted by an individual can always be abolished by another individual; philosophies change with tastes, they follow the downward slope of history, because as soon as man is detached from his reason for existence, rooted in God, he can only slide downwards, in conformity with the law of gravity which is valid for the human order as well as for the physical order, notwithstanding the periodic renewal effected by the religions, the sages and the saints.
Now the fact that the Divine Law, insofar as it is fundamental and thereby universal, is definitively the only efficacious one - to the degree that a Law can and must be so - this fact shows that it is a Message of Truth; it alone is incontestable and irreplaceable.
To be sure the contemporary world still possesses codes and civil laws, but even so for the general mentality there is less and less an authority which is such "by right", and not merely "in fact". Moreover, the Law is made to protect not only society, but also the individual prone to offense; if the "secular arm" inspires fear to the degree that badly intentioned men feel threatened by it, on the other hand these same men have no intrinsic motive not to follow their inclinations, outside the fear of God. The threat of human justice is uncertain, hence relative; that of the divine justice is absolute; for it is possible to escape men, but certainly not God.
In summary: one indirect proof of God is that without Divinity there is no authority, and without authority there is no efficacy; that is to say that the religious Message imposes itself - apart from its other imperatives - because no moral and social life is possible without it, except for a brief period which, without admitting it, is still living off the residues of a disavowed heritage.
And this brings us to another extrinsic proof a contrario of God, although it is fundamentally the same: it is a fact of experience that the common man, on the whole, who is not disciplined by social necessity and who precisely is only disciplined by religion and piety, decays in his behaviour as soon as he has no more religion containing and penetrating him; and experience proves that the disappearance of faith and of morals brings about that of personal dignity and of private life, which in fact only have meaning and value if man possesses an immortal soul.
It is hardly necessary to recall here that believing peasants and artisans are often of an aristocratic nature, and that they are so through religion; without forgetting that aristocracy in itself, namely nobility of sentiment and comportment and the tendency to control and transcend oneself, derives from spirituality and draws its principles from it, consciously or unconsciously.
What the people need in order to find a meaning in life, hence a possibility of earthly happiness, is religion and the crafts: religion because every man has need of it, and the crafts because they allow man to manifest his personality and to realize his vocation in the framework of a sapiential symbolism; every man loves intelligible work and work well done.
Now industrialism has robbed the people of both things: on the one hand of religion, denied by scientism from which industry derives, and rendered unlikely by the inhuman character of the mechanistic ambience, and on the other hand the crafts, replaced precisely by machinism; so much so that in spite of all the "social doctrines" of the Church and the nationalistic bourgeoisie, there is nothing left for the people which can give a meaning to their life and make them happy.
The classic contradiction of traditional Catholicism is to want to maintain the social hierarchy, in which it is theoretically right, even while accepting whole-heartedly (as an acquisition of the "Christian civilization" which in fact has long been abolished) the scientism and the machinism which precisely compromise this hierarchy by cutting the people off, in fact, from humankind.
The inverse error is founded on the same cult of technology, with the difference that it is detrimental to the bourgeoisie rather than to the common people and that it aims at reducing the entire society to mechanistic inhumanity while on the other hand presenting it with an "opium" made of bitterness and frigidity which kills the very organ of happiness; for to be happy it is necessary to be a child, happiness being made of gratitude and confidence, humanly speaking.
The machine is opposed to man, consequently it is also opposed to God; in a world where it poses as norm, it abolishes both the human and the divine. The logical solution to the problem would be the return (which in fact has become impossible without a divine intervention) to the crafts and at the same time to religion – and thereby to an ambience which, by not falsifying our sense of the real, does not make unlikely what is evident.
One of the greatest successes of the devil was to create around man surroundings in which God and immortality appear unbelievable. (And this certainly is not, in spite of all illusions, "Christian civilization".)
(It will undoubtedly be objected that the Church could not compromise itself by opposing that "irreversible" phenomenon which is industrialism; we would reply first of all that the truth has precedence over any consideration of opportuneness or of "irreversibility", and then that the Church could always have affirmed its doctrinal position, to all intents and purposes, without having to be unrealistic on the level of facts; it could moreover have opted, with perfect logic and in accord with its entire past, for the monarchist and traditional right-wing which upheld it by definition, without having to compromise itself in the eyes of some, with the ambiguous "right" born in the XIXth century in the shadow of the machine.)
----
Excerpt from the Divine to the Human by Frithjof Schuon
----
image: The Facundus Codex - illustration for Rev 8:7-8