The mitigation of moral laws can represent an intrinsic superiority only on two conditions: firstly that it confers a concrete advantage on society, and secondly that it be not obtained at the cost of that which gives meaning to life.

When one is speaking of ancient traditional peoples, it is important not to confuse healthy and integral civilizations with the great paganisms (for the term is justified here) of the Mediterranean and the Near East, of whom Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar have become the classic incarnations and conventional images. What strikes one first in these "petrified" traditions of the world of the Bible is a cult of the massive and the gigantic, as well as a cosmolatry often accompanied by sanguinary rites, not forgetting a development to excess of magic and the arts of divination.

 

In civilizations of this kind the supernatural is replaced by magic, and the here and now is divinized while nothing is offered for the hereafter, at least in the exoteric field which in fact overwhelms everything else; a sort of marmorean divinization of the human is combined with a passionate humaniza tion of the Divine; potentates are demigods and the gods preside over all the passions.

 

A question that might arise here is the following: how was it that these old religions could deviate into paganism and then become extinct, where as a similar destiny seems to be excluded in the case of the great traditions that are alive today in the West and in the East? The answer is that traditions having a prehistoric origin are, symbolically speaking, made for "space" and not for "time"; that is to say, they saw the light in a prinordial epoch when time was still but a rhythm in a spatial and static beatitude, and when space or simultaneity still predominated over the experience of duration and change.

 

The historical traditions on the other hand must take, the experience of "time" into account and must foresee instability and decadence, since they were born in periods when time had become like a fast-flowing river and ever more devouring, and when the spiritual outlook had to be centered on the end of the world.

 

The position of Hinduism is intermediate in the sense that it has the faculty, exceptional in a tradition of the primordial type, of rejuvenation and adaptation; it is thus both prehistoric and historic and realizes in its own way the miracle of a synthesis between the gods of Egypt and the God of Israel.

 

To return to the Babylonians: the lithoidal (stone-like) character of this type of civilization cannot be explained in terms of a tendency to excess alone; it may also be explained in terms of a sense of the changeless; it is as if they had seen the primordial beatitude evaporating and had therefore wanted to build a fortress, with the result that the spirit was stifled instead of being protected; seen from this angle the marmorean (marble-like) and inhuman side of these paganisms looks like a titanic reaction of space against time. From this point of view the implacability of the stars is paradoxically combined with the passions of bodies; the stellar vault is always present, divine and crushing, while an overflowing life takes the place of a terrestrial divinity.

 

From another point of view, many of the characteristics of the civilizations of antiquity are explained by the fact that in the beginning the celestial Law was of an adamantine severity while at the same time life still retained something of the celestial. Babylon lived falsely on this sort of recollection; but there existed nonetheless, at the very heart of the most cruel paganisms, mitigations that can be accounted for by changes in the cyclical atmosphere. The celestial Law becomes less demanding as the end of our cycle approaches; Clemency grows as man becomes weaker. The acquittal by Christ of the adulterous woman carries this meaning - apart from other meanings no less admissible - and so does the intervention of the angel in the sacrifice of Abraham.

 

Nobody would think of complaining of the mitigation of moral laws; it is, however, proper to consider it, not in isolation, but in its context, because it is the context that reveals its intention, its range and its value. In reality the mitigation of moral laws - to the extent that it is not illusory - can represent an intrinsic superiority only on two conditions, namely, firstly that it confers a concrete advantage on society, and secondly that it be not obtained at the cost of that which gives meaning to life.

 

Respect for the human person must not open the door to a dictatorship of error and baseness, to the crushing of quality by quantity, to general corruption and the loss of cultural values, for if it does so it is, in relation to the ancient tyrannies, but an opposite extreme and not the norm. When humanitarianism is no more than the expression of an over-valuation of the human at the expense of the Divine, or of the crude fact at the expense of the truth, it cannot possibly be counted as a positive acquisition.

 

It is easy to criticize the "fanaticism" of our ancestors when one has lost the very notion of a truth that brings salvation, or to be "tolerant" when one despises religion.

 

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Frithjof Schuon: Light on The Ancient Worlds

 

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