Knowledge and Its Counterfeit by Gai Eaton

8/2/2019 Knowledge and Its Counterfeit by Gai Eaton

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KNOWLEDGEAND ITS by Gai Eaton, Winter 1974

COUNTERFEIT


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IT would not be particularly surprising if the notion of mans

viceregal dignity were unacceptable to a number of people.

What is really astonishing is that it should now be unimaginable to

the majority of people in the Westor perhaps one should say to

the majority of educated people everywhere. That a view of the

world and of mans destiny which could, until so recently, be

counted as a normal human characteristic should be dismissed in

its entirety as a fairy story would be incredible if it had not actually

happened.

No wonder that some of those who hold to the traditional viewbelieve that the devil himself has bewitched our kind, putting to

sleep the faculties through which they were formerly aware of

realities beyond the field of sense-perception and making use of

mirages to lead them on into the waterless desert. But the process

of deception can at least be charted and analysed in fairly simple

terms, not least in terms of what Mircea Eliade has called the

provincialism of modern thought.

In the first place, our contemporaries ascribe their own basic

assumptions to the people of other times and other cultures and

therefore suppose that if they did not deduce what we have

deduced from these assumptions they must necessarily have

been our inferiors. It is taken for granted that their beliefs were

derived as ours are from the observation of physical phenomenaand that they were always trying to do what we in fact have

done. It is not unusual for children to enjoy a sense of superiority

over parents who cannot climb trees as well as they can or who

make a mess of a jigsaw puzzle that is no problem to an eight-

year-old. A child may wonder why a grown-up who can afford to

buy ice-cream or chocolates every day of his life does not do so,

just as we are puzzled that the ancients did not turn their minds to


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science. Grown-ups, however, have other things which demand

their attention.

In this sense, modern provincialism is essentially childish. It

assumes that if all we want is ice-cream, then this is all that people

ever wanted. They did not know how to produce it quickly,

hygienically and in quantity. We do. They would have given the

little they possessed to have motor cars and aeroplanes, but they

were not clever enough to invent them. We have invented and

made them (it was not, after all, very difficult). And they thought

the Earth was the centre of the Universe. We know better.

This kind of argument may not be produced by intellectuals, but it

is brought out again and again by ordinary people and

swallowed whole by non-Europeans who, having shaken off

Western political domination, submit like lambs to the imperialism

of Western ideas and feel ashamed that they themselves did not

invent the car and the aeroplane. In this mood of shame and self-

humiliation they may even become Marxist Socialists, which

makes them true Europeans in everything but the colour of their

skin.

The provincialism of modern thought is apparent, secondly, in the

rule of fashion, which governs philosophy and ideology as it doesthe arts. The theory of evolution (as it is popularly understood) and

belief in progress make it almost inevitable that last years

thoughts and theories should be considered as out-of-date as last

years dress. Anddepending, as they do, upon the picture of the

world presented by physical sciencethese theories and thoughts

must change with the changing hypotheses by which scientists try

to interpret physical phenomena. If even our grandfathers were

ignorant of most of the facts upon which our present beliefs are


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based, the thoughts of men far distant in time or unacquainted

with modern science are assumed to have been little more than

the fumbling notions of creatures just down from the trees. There

is, then, a provincialism in time which isolates the narrow world of

todayor this yearfrom all that went before.

Thirdly, and perhaps in the most significant sense, we are

provincial in that we live and think and have faith only within the

strict limits of faculties given to us to deal with our own small corner

of creation and ill-adapted (as is our language itself) to anything

beyond self-preservation and the getting of food. Our ideas oftruth and indeed of all that is are confined to what fits the

contours of a mind as limited in its way as are our physical senses;

and we are necessarily agnostics, in the exact sense of the term,

since it is obvious that the mind as such cannot knowwithin its

own terms of referencewhat lies beyond this particular locality

and the view visible from here.

The distinction between agnosticism and ignorance is an

important one in our age, particularly if one reduces the two terms

to their basic meaning : in the one case, There is nothing for me

to know; in the other, I do not know. The one raises a personal

incapacity to the dignity of a universal law, the other merely

admits incapacity and tries to live with it. The one claims to say

something about human nature; the other makes a personalstatement. And because it is our nature to universalise private

experience, it does not take long for ignorance to transform itself

into agnosticism, particularly in an egalitarian age. For the

emotional strength of the agnostic attitude lies in the refusal to

admit that anyone can be or could ever have been our superior

in this, the most important of all human functionsthe knowledge

of what there is to be known. Religion in our time is generally

thought of in terms of faith rather than of knowledge. In


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egalitarian terms, faith is all right. You can believe in fairies if you

want to. But knowledge, the knowledge of realities beyond the

minds immediate compass, excludes those who do not possess it

and seems presumptuous. The idea that a saint among the saints

may have known Godnot merely believed in Him, as anyone is

free to dosuggests that someone has been enjoying an unfair

advantage, like a rich man who uses a loophole in the income-tax

law that is denied to the rest of us.

When it comes to matters of belief, each age has its particular set

of assumptions which appear to it self-evident (and form the basisof its reasoning), and these assumptions are likely to exclude

others which seemed equally self-evident at a different time in

history. Reasoning always plays a subsidiary role, for reason does

not operate in a vacuumit works on the material presented to it

in the form of basic assumptions that are taken for granted.

It is in terms of our characteristic assumptions here and now that

most people are prepared to accept certain ideas on faith but

demand proof as soon as a different complex of ideas is

brought to their attention. One man says, Show me God and Ill

believe in him. But another might say, quite reasonably, Show

me an actual case of the transformation of species and Ill believe

in evolution. There is, however, an important difference between

the two cases. In the first, St. Augustines dictum, Believe in orderthat you may know makes sense. In a certain sense, it may apply

in the second case as well, for we must believe in the scientists

basic assumptions before we can accept his theories as a form of

knowledge. But here the resemblance ends. We are not being

offered knowledge as such. The proposition to which we are

required to agree is that given these assumptions and given the

absolute validity of human reasoning, assuming also that the

simplest explanation of a particular phenomenon is always the


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right one and that the physical world is sealed off from any

interference from other realms, then we would accept the

scientists conclusions if we had received the same technical

training as he had.

The scientific age is necessarily an age of blind belief. No longer

can men be told that the assumptions of their time will be

confirmed in their own personal experience if only they look

deeply enough into this experience; and, compared with the

arguments of theology, the arguments of contemporary science

are so abstract, so technical that they are no longer open tocriticism by the non-specialist and cannot be tested against any

kind of experience known to man as a living creature. We must

accept them or reject them on principle.

Meanwhile, the scientist himself requires a very special kind of

faith. He must assume the absolute validity of his own mental

processes and believe that the logic of these processes is a

universal law to which everything that is or ever could be

conforms. Not altogether unlike the man who interprets the

outside world in terms of what is going on in his own entrails,

seeing a bright day when he is feeling well and finding the world a

dark and sinister place when his system is choked with waste

products, he applies to the data provided by observation and by

its instruments the rules which govern his own mentality, amentality constructed for the practical business of living much as

the entrails are constructed for the digestion of food. Since inner

and outer are, in the last analysis, two sides of the same coin, he

will findif he has applied these rules accuratelythat the

protean physical world will provide the answers he expects of it

(the answers being already implied in the phrasing of his

questions) and experiments will confirm the conclusions he has


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reached without ever, in fact, taking him beyond the subjective

realm.

However complex the machines and instruments we have

designed to extend the apparent range of our senses, scientific

exploration is always in some measure dealing with patterns

inherent in the exploring mind and meeting with the mirror images

it has projected. Nature mocks and eludes us, while seeming to fall

in with the framework dictated by our own logical process,

obliging us because our minds are themselves embedded in her

structure. We try to think of our-selves, so far as our mentality isconcerned, as standingor floating above the natural world,

competent to survey it objectively, and the intervention of

scientific instruments between our own naked senses and what is

observed heightens the illusion of objectivity; but what is by its

nature embedded in the matrix of the world can never escape

and look down as a disembodied agent upon its own matrix. That

element in man which does transcend the natural world is in him

but not of him, and the objectivity of its awareness is very different

from the fictional objectivity exercised by one facet of nature in

relation to another.

But while the scientist in his increasingly private and abstract

sphere finds a marvellous concordance between his mental

experience and the behaviour of a needle on a dial or the tracesof radiation on a photo-graphic plate, the ordinary man of our

time faces a widening gulf set between scientific fact and any

kind of immediate experience known to him. It might he said that

this gulf first showed itself when the fact that the earth circles the

sun was made generally known, displacing the factequally valid

in its own contextthat our normal experience is of a sun which

rises and sets, circling our central place.


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The factsor supposed factswhich dominate most peoples

thinking today and which are presented in the schoolroom as the

linchpins of modern knowledge are for the most part quiteoutside the range of our normal experience and quite unverifiable

in personal terms. While in no possible sense supernatural, they lie

beyond the framework of nature as we know it in our daily lives,

and their proof is to be found only in experiments carried out

under almost unimaginable conditions (at temperatures a fraction

above absolute zero, and so on) by means of immensely complex

equipment. In terms of experienceand a fact, after all, is

normally something against which we expect to be able to stub

our toesthis is a very remote and estoteric region. And it is partly

because the facts presented by contemporary science are

unverifiable in experience and because they have their source in

the extra-terrestial conditions created in the secrecy of the

laboratory that they have such power to bind and to dominate.

Their glassy surface offers no purchase to the sceptical probing of

the ordinary mind.

A field of knowledge in which the ordinary man can participate

only by believing what he is told corresponds well enough to the

political field of the monolithic State in which man participates

only by doing what he is told; while the conviction that every new

fact which is discovered adds to the universal store of

knowledge and that this quantitative increase in knowledge is an

unqualified good finds its echo in the notion that every

technological advance represents a plus sign in relation to the

increase of human wellbeing.

Speaking of the normal and providential limitation of the data of

experience, Schuon remarks that, while no knowledge is bad in


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itself and in principle, many forms of knowledge can be harmful in

practice because they do not correspond to mans hereditary

habits and are imposed on him without his being spiritually

prepared; the soul finds it hard to accommodate facts that nature

has not offered to its experience, unless it is enlightened with

metaphysical knowledge or with an impregnable sanctity. The

unenlightened and unsanctified personality subjected to a

barrage of facts which contradict its own intimate experience

and contribute nothing to its growth and maturing is more likely to

be maimed than nourished.

Facts as such lodge only in the mind. In so far as our ideas are

changed, our feelings and our conduct will be affected, but the

ideas which induce this personality-change remain purely mental

in character and cannot normally be represented in other terms.

In sharp contrast to this, the metaphysical truths at the root of

human belief in other times, since they lie outside the boundaries

of the human personality as such, are no more exclusively mental

than they are exclusively emotional. They may be expressible in a

mental formulaan idea or a statementbut they cannot be

enclosed in this formula or confined within its necessary limitations.

In traditional societies they were reflected not merely in the

theories by which the mind organises its material, but also in myths

and symbols, in the structure of the mirrors which society held up

to its members and in the sacred or ritual element which entered

into the web of everyday lifeinto a mans waking and hissleeping, his eating, his love-making, his fighting and his work.

When such truth as is supposed to be known lodges only in the

mind, man is divided against himself or elseif he achieves a kind

of enforced unitysubmits to the domination of the mental over

his other faculties. But what a man does, what he brands with his

name, is the expression of his whole personality, not simply of some


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aspects of what he is. Fragmentation of the personality is

characteristic of modern as against primitive thought; and the

questions that are raised concerning mans role in society, the

distinction between creative work and labour, or patterns of

sexual behaviour only arise because of this fragmentation, this

dissociation of part from part.

Since responsibility is necessarily a function of the whole man,

those whose actions are dictated by only one part of their nature

find it dangerously easy to deny paternity when they are faced

with the consequences of what they have done. The scientistwhose pursuit of factual knowledge leads (indirectly, as it seems to

him) to certain undesirable developments is aware that he never

willed these developments, just as the man who rapes a young girl

under emotional compulsion knows quite well that he never

meant to harm her. The scientist may suggest that the pursuit of

knowledge for its own sake is natural to man, just as the rapist may

feel that emotion, if it is powerful enough, contains its own

justification; and both can take refuge in the excessive emphasis

upon motives and intentions which isolates modern man from the

great web of consequences which he actualises. But

consequences do follow acts, and they must belong to someone.

The dedicated scientist working long hours in his laboratoryyet

happy as a child at playcareless about money and charminglynaive in matters of sex is a popular image, and although real

scientists are not always quite like this they can be forgiven for

adopting the required pose on occasions. Like so many masks, it

expresses a truth. And, when this same scientist is faced with the

consequences of his pursuit of knowledge, the truth behind the

pose becomes shockingly apparent; he reacts as someone so

dedicated to the task in hand thatlike the rapisthe could see

no further ahead. With indecent haste he searches for


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scapegoats (wicked politicians or rapacious businessmen) who

have bent his innocent discoveries to their own purpose, he

having always supposed that none but angels would handle and

apply the knowledge he has wrung from his intercourse with the

natural world.

It is not as though he had never been warned. And this is perhaps

the most extraordinary feature of the scientists claim to

innocence. The very fact that he can practise his pursuit of

knowledge in freedom is, in his viewand according to what we

are all taught at schoolthe result of a hard-fought battle againstpersecution, against obscurantism, against superstition. But

there is another way of looking at the obstructions which were

formerly placed in the way of scientific advance. A fence at the

edge of a cliff is an obstruction, but it has not been placed where

it is without reason; and to suppose that the men who raised these

obstructions in the way of science were quite without intelligence

or foresight is an impertinence which only reflects our own

stupidity. The investigation of the natural world in depth and the

pursuit of factual knowledge for its own sake were once regarded

as dangerous and ultimately destructive activities. It is absurd to

be surprised when these activities do turn out to be both

dangerous and ultimately destructive.

For Ibn Arabi, the greatest of the medieval Muslim philosophers,such delving into the operations of nature was a form of incest, a

prying under the Mothers skirts. And this is one way of

characterising the efforts of one facet of the natural world to

know another facet bearing in mind the Biblical use of the verb

to know. The penetration of nature by the fact-finding and

analytic mind keeps time with the rape of the earth we tread and

the exploitation of our fellow creatures. An incestuous conjunction

of mind with matter engenders some monstrous offspring.


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* * *

Few things are more irritating to those who accept the scientificview in its entirety (while taking pride in their open-mindedness)

than the alternating attitudes of Olympian superiority and quiet

evasiveness which seem to them characteristic of the opponents

of science. And because the opponents of science are

necessarily on the defensive, in a world which is overwhelmingly

convinced of the truth of the scientific view, they are bound to

take refuge sometimes in mystery if not in mystification. A duellist

who is constantly challenged to fight with weapons of his

opponents choosing must keep some tricks up his sleeve.

But perhaps there is no duel to be fought or won. Perhaps these

antagonists have only the illusion of meeting and there is only the

spectaclefamiliar in farceof two men shadow-boxing at

opposite sides of the stage, ludicrously unaware that their blowsnever make contact. For they are in different places. It is not

enough to share a common language, if there are no common

assumptions to provide an agreed basis for argument. Without

such a basis, argument leads only to a fever of irritation because

each participant feels that the other is missing the point. As,

indeed, he is, since the point is the truth as seen from the place

at which each has taken his stand and they are too far apart to

share the same view of the mountain which is the ultimate theme

of their dialogue.

This, however, suggests or could be taken to suggest that the

different views are of equal validity. When it comes to a question

of perspectives, even if we ignore the possibility of a total view,

there is a distinction to be made between the narrow perspectiveand the broad one, the provincial perspective and a more


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universal one, The idea that it is possible to see another mans

point of view implies to some extent that it is possible to be that

other man. Points of view can never entirely coincide, even within

an integrated and virtually unanimous society, but they can be

sufficiently close under normal circumstances for some kind of

dialogue to be possible. The situation in which we now find

ourselves is not a normal one so far as the human race is

concerned. Heirs of a fairly unified culture, we retain the habit of

taking for granted a certain uniformity of viewpoint, but in our age

it is possible for men living side-by-side in the same society to pass

their lives in totally different worlds.

Because such a situation is by nature painful, those who take their

stand upon the religious view, being in a minority and respecting

democratic practice, have gone to extraordinary lengths to meet

their scientific stable-mates rather more than halfway, as though

a man who had been looking over a fence were to squat down

for the sake of keeping company with his childrenand peer

through the hole they have bored in the wood, swearing that this

is all that can possibly be seen of the world next door.

If provincialism is taken to mean narrowness of view, then Eliades

phrase is particularly apt in the context of the process of

contraction which has been taking place for a long time and was

already well advanced when Descartes made awareness of hisown thinking-self the starting-point of human knowledge, but took

care to shut the doors and windows before sinking into the cavern

of mental self-awareness. To all appearances, the outer world has

expanded as the inner one has contracted. The small, vaulted

universe, lit by a friendly lamp and haunted by familiar spirits, has

opened out into the unimaginable vastness of space with its thin

population of burning stars, while a vast spiritual world extending

from nadir to Empyrean has contracted to the dimensions of the


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skull-box; and one might visualise this process (so well expressed in

the scientific theory of an expanding universe) in terms of a

childs bubble-blowingan objective world which increases in

sheer size as man pumps his life-breath into it. But size, unless it has

human significance, is meaningless and as nothing in relation to a

timeless eternity. A distance of a million light years is further than a

man could walk: and having said this there is little more to be said

about such distances. They are irrelevant to the business of being

a man.

It is in this senseand in no otherthat man is the measure of allthings. If he is Viceroy, his concern in time is with the province that

is given him as his particular destiny. His concern beyond this

province is with an eternity that is not subject to contraction or

expansion. With the contraction of mans idea of his own identity,

the outer world has grown in size, but it has become a desert.

If we acknowledge that on a certain level (a level beyond the

causal web of everyday life) the distinction between inner and

outer, though it may still have a certain symbolic significance, is

no longer final or even useful, then arguments regarding mans

dependence upon his environment or his environments

dependence upon him lead no further than does the dispute as

to which came firstthe chicken or the egg. But we are free to

employ figures of speech which suggest the precedence of oneover the other without prejudice to the wider view which sees

both as aspects of a single identity, just as we may employ the

practical terminology of cause-and-effect without in any way

denying a Divine Omnipotence for which the chain of action and

reaction is only the projection in time of a single and timeless

event. It is all a matter of levels and perspectives, of situating

apparently opposed ideas and irreconcilable facts where they

belong.


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To attempt to fit aspects of the truth which belong to different

levels and make sense according to different perspectives into

one framework at one particular level (that of the laws whichgovern our mental processes in the context of everyday life) is an

impossible task. It is also an unnecessary task, for we ourselves do

not exist on one level only. But this is what rationalism, with its two-

dimensional scheme of things, tries to do, and this is why the

scientific view, isolated in its two-dimensional world, cannot be

attacked on its own ground or in terms of the proofs and

arguments which it considers valid.

It would be too easyand yet partially trueto say that rational-

ism is false simply because it is an -ism. In fact it is false because

of its pretensions to universality, its claim to include the whole of

reality within its own orbit, and its exclusion of everything that

cannot be fitted into its particular and local categories. Reason is

a mode of knowledge. Rationalism is its characteristic Pharonicsin.

Man is a rational being, but he is also something more than that.

Reason is his toolnot his definition. The cancerous tendency of

the part to behave as though it were the whole operates here as

in so many other fields. Reason functions in terms of strict and

irreconcilable alternatives. This is black or white. This creature is

either male or female. Either this animal will eat me or I shall eat it.

Such is its nature, since it is one of the tools given us to deal with

the context in which our mental and sensory experience unfolds.

And, since this experience is a form of true knowledge, the

instruments through which it is perceived and organised cannot

be falseso long as they keep their place. The man who believes

he can interpret all that is in terms of reason does not differ greatly


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from one who thinks he can absorb and digest knowledge

through his belly.

Those who cannot accept that they add up to more than the sum

of their own instruments or that it does not necessarily follow

because this is true that that must be false and who will not

accept that the region of possible knowledge extends into

categories beyond those of human reason (and into moulds quite

unrelated to the contours of the human mind) are voluntary

prisoners in their own empirical and conditioned selfhood. Their

speculation is a ball bounced against the walls of their cell.

That there should be truths inconceivable in mental terms is

intolerable to the greedy mind (acting as Censor), and, in so far as

we submit to this censorship and are inwardly convinced that

knowledge is the province of the mind and of the mind only, we

cannot but dismiss the inconceivable as unknowable and, for all

practical purposes, unreal. Illusions are always conceivable

because illusions, as we understand the term, cannot exist without

our help and are rooted in our faculties. But truth does not need us

and is in no way dependent upon our powers of

conceptualisation. God, in His Essence, is said to be quite

inconceivable in terms of the minds language; but there is

nothing inconceivable about a flying hippopotamus, however

improbable we may suppose such a creature to be. The mindcomprehends facts and is at ease with fictions. It is not by its

nature apt to grasp realities.

But to be incapable of grasping something in the sense of

possessing and assimilating it does not necessarily imply complete

alienation. If the mind had no contact with reality, then we would

all be madder than mad, indeed we would not be here at allor


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there or anywhere else. And if reality could not in some measure

be represented in mental, emotional and physical terms it would

not be reality. What has been lost in a mind-fixated age is the

awareness that the mental representation is by its nature limited

and incomplete, as is the emotional image or the physical symbol.

Truth is expressed in these different languages. It is not exhausted

by anything that they can say about it. And the antinomies which

exist at one level are reconciled at another.

There is a necessary tension in the religious and intellectual sphere

between acceptance and rejection of the partial images throughwhich mind, emotion and senses maintain their hold on reality.

Most of us cannot do without our mental concepts, our

anthropomorphic image of God and our physical symbols, and

the hidden truth responds to our need because it is by its nature

partially conceivable, a fit object for love, and present in the

sights, sounds, odours, flavours and tactile qualities of the physical

world. To reject such partial knowledge as is offered by our natural

faculties because it is no more than partial leads nowhere. It is the

folly of those who, when they are made aware that reason has its

limitations, turn to a kind of doctrinaire irrationalism. But to

suppose that truth in its wholeness can be encompassed by these

faculties is a form of idolatry.

The inveterate human tendency to idolatry (worship of thereflection rather than of that which is reflected) is, in the Islamic

view, the most dangerous and the most universal of sins. The

Islamic Revelation broke in upon a culture which had petrified into

gross forms of idolatry at a time when the breaking of images and

the release of the spirit of truth from its stony prison were most

necessary. But outside of historic circumstances which determine

the accents and emphasis of a particular religion, this Revelation

had the providential function of redressing the balance between


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those who try to bind the truth in mental formulae, emotional

fixations and physical images, and those who insist upon its

absolute transcendence over all that we are capable of thinking

or feeling or doing.

Without supernatural wisdomand without the humility which

recognises the subordination of reason to that wisdomit is

impossible for the human mind as such to keep the balance

between transcendence and immanence, reconciling the idea of

God as totally other (in Quranic terms, having no likeness

whatsoever) and the idea of God as intimately present ineverything that has existence (in Quranic terms, closer to man

than his jugular vein). But it remains a useful exercise for the mind

to set such contrary ideas side-by-side in its narrow cabin (as the

Zen Buddhists do by means of their paradoxical koans) until it

begins to sense, beyond its own reach, the presence of a point at

which the contraries meet.

When two ideas, each parcelled and capsulated in accordance

with our mental needs, appear at once irreconcilableas do the

notions of predestination and free willand yet necessary if

the world makes any kind of sense, then we can only reach out

towards that incomprehensible point. But, if that point is beyond

the reach of our bread-and-butter faculties and can never be

captured by a mind which insists upon absolute rights ofpossession, this does not mean that it has no contact with the

world we inhabit, no relation to the human person in his totality.

On the contrary, the beliefnormal to mankindthat there is a

meaning inherent in everything that exists and in everything that

happens must necessarily imply the omnipresence of that point,

that truth, that centre.


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Such argument as this is soon classified so far as those who hunger

after classification are concerned. This is mysticismor as near

to it as makes no difference. As such it can be dismissed, not with

the hostility and resentment which so often accompanies the

dismissal of organised religion, but with a gesture of respect,

even a muted sound of trumpets, as something too remote from

everyday life to represent a threata gentle and poetic

eccentricity. Yet there have been some good swordsmen among

the mystics who, like David, have slain their ten-thousands.

In so far as the term has any precise meaning, mystics have nodoubt existed and followed their inward path in all periods,

triumphing over the obstacles placed in their path by social chaos

or social regimentation, sharing the peculiar vocation of the

heroes and martyrs who stride over the turbulence or the

petrifiction of their world with all the splendour of elephants

rampaging through the bush. But the place they are going is the

place we are going. And most of us are not mystics, heroes or

potential martyrs. We are not even elephants.

This is where the attempt to isolate mystical experience from the

normal stream of life in the sense in which, for example, musical

experience may be isolated as something irrelevant to the lives of

those who cannot share it, breaks down. The mystic is different

from the rest only as the flyer is different from the walker, thoughboth must reach the city walls before nightfall. What he is talking

about is as much their business as his. But while he may find his

way unaided, the common man, the quite unelephantine man,

needs help and has a right to expect this help from the society in

which he lives; and human societies, if they are to make any claim

upon our loyalty beyond the claim of mutual convenience, exist

to beat a path through the bush for those who cannot fly or even

trample. To provide paths to the mystics goal which are


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walkable by everyman is the justification of traditional human

societies, and it was as vehicles fit to carry multitudes across the

existential river that these societies demanded and received the

loyalty of their members. This was their title to legitimacy.

A society which bases its solidarity upon mens need to huddle

together in mutual protection against the forces of the jungle has

its uses, but it can scarcely claim a loyalty beyond the

consideration of self-interestor beyond what it can impose

through fear of the law and of the police. This is the social

contract upon which modern societies are based, including thedictatorships (for the sheep will sometimes look to the wolf for

protection). And, since few are likely to be mystics and only a

minority can draw adequate spiritual support from private religion

(that is to say, a religion which is con-fined to the personal realm

and does not permeate the whole of a society, a community or a

tribe), the majority of those who live in a profane society remain

imprisoned in a very cold and narrow place.

It is because such a caged life as this can only be a life starved of

realities for which man has an inherent hunger that the rebel and

the misfit assume a role of peculiar importance in modern society

and exercise such a fascination over contemporary artists and

novelists, while satyr and nymphomaniac, drunkard and drug-

addict become significant figureshowever tormented andunsatisfiedin the drama of release from a prison too humdrum to

be tolerated, bearing witness on the one hand to the fact that

sexuality provides a compelling real experience, whatever its

context, and, on the other, to the not unreason-able view that an

illusion of escape is preferable to no escape at all. Those among

the good prisoners who are too sophisticated to thunder moral

denunciations now dismiss sexual obsession as boring and

addiction as a sickness. But when it comes to offering an


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alternative they can only suggest that the would-be escaper

should try to become a trusty.

What the traditional, God-centred societies offered their members

was a life saturated with the awareness of realities beyond the

reach of mind, feeling or sense in terms of their normal

functioninga life of ignorance and superstition, as the trusties

sayand a whole complex of bridges leading to hillock or

mountain, as the case might be, but certainly leading upwards

and outwards from the flatlands. Objects of sense were alive with

symbolism, emotion was universalised in ritual and mentalconcepts were not self-sufficient propositions (enclosing and

limiting reality), but keys to supernatural knowledge.

In earlier times, says Thibon, men did not know all the contours of

the human and cosmic lock, but they possessed the key . . .

Modern thought as a whole no longer occupies itself at all with

the nature or existence of this key. The only questions posed

before a closed door is to examine it most painstakingly, not to

open it.[1] Or else we ignore the door altogether (taking it for a

section of an impenetrable wall) and set the key under a

microscope, treating the instrument that lies in our hands as

though it were an end in itself.

This is not far from being a definition of idolatryto worship a key

instead of setting it to the lock. And here we come to the great

divide which separates rationalism and all its offshoots from the

traditional view of ideas, feelings and the phenomena of the

physical world as symbols and therefore as signs which, if they are

properly used, point towards the perfection which, in their

flickering fashion, they signify. We shall show them Our signs on


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the horizon and within themselves, until it is clear to them that this

is the Truth.[2]

But to live with things that are other than they seem, among signs

that point away from themselves, amidst bridges that lead

elsewhere and ladders of which only the lower rungs are visible is

hard for those who hunger after factual certainties. It is easier to

settle down where we are and regard the sign as a work of art,

the bridge as a piece of masonry and the ladder as a wooden

frame, accepting appearances for what they are worth and

trying to forget that death willso far as we are concerneddissolve all such works into nothingness.

* * *

Primordial man sees the more in the less, says Schuon. The

infrahuman world in fact reflects the heavens and transmits in an

existential language a divine message that is at once multiple and

unique.[3] Christianity, he points out, could not but react against

the real paganism in the environment within which it crystallised

as a world religion, but in so doing it also destroyed values which

did not in the least merit the reproach of paganism : modern

technology is but an end product, no doubt very indirect, of a

perspective which, after having banished the gods and genies

from nature and having rendered it profane, by this very factfinally made possible its profanation in the most brutal sense of

this word.

Paganism in the proper sense of the term is an idolatry applied to

the natural world, but it is also, in most cases, the debris of a

religion in the final stage of decay, the stage at which its followers,

like dogs, sniff at the pointed finger rather than going where the


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finger points. Paganism is idolatry, animism, fetishism and so on;

and these aberrations all bear witness to the fact that something

which was once adored as a symbol of the reality which lay

behind its fragile presence has come to be worshipped for its own

sake. But every religion is likely eventually to degenerate into

paganism if the world lasts long enough. It follows that the

distinction between images which are adored as symbols and

images which are worshipped as gods is hard to make; in any

religious contextand particularly in that of Hinduism, to take one

examplethere will be those who understand that the image

points away from itself and those who mistake the image for an

end in itself.

A new Divine Revelation, breaking in upon the rusty structure of

the particular milieu to which it is directed, is likely to sweep such

images aside. It offers a real and effective alternativea highroad

in place of the little bridges and ladders that people had been

using (or misusing) for ages past. But when the highroad itself has

begun to suffer the erosion of time and when (this being the

nature of times action) it has narrowed and contracted, then the

loss is felt. Once the highroad has gone out of sight, so far as the

majority of people are concerned, no bridge is to be despised, no

ladder scorned as primitive, naive or clumsy. It is, in any case,

one thing for the lightning stroke to destroy such supports and

quite another for busy, opinionated little men to set themselves up

as wreckers.

Islam and Christianity were both, at their inception, revolutionary

religions and therefore destructiveat least in a certain sense.

Since it is that section of the world which was formerly Christian

that has imposed its own pattern almost universally, ex-Christians

are the wreckers with whom we must be chiefly concerned. And

all Westerners who are not Christians are ex-Christians, whether


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they like it or not: a heritage cannot easily be shaken off, and the

fiercest opponents of Christianity are those who reject God for not

Himself being a Christian (as they understand the term). The

destructiveness which was once no more than a side-effect of a

great act of renewal turns sour and vicious in those for whom the

blazing certainty of Gods love and of Christs redemptive

sacrifice have no meaning. The rose, in decay, stinks.

In a certain sense the world is nothing but a tissue of bridges, and

in theory it is open to any man to recognise sticks and stones for

what they really are and so to find himself in a Paradise that wasnever finally lost. For him, no doubt, the universeso opaque, so

darkened in this winter seasonis still transparent as it is said to

have been when it issued from the hand of God, and prison bars

are no more than candy-sticks that snap in a childs grip; perhaps

there will always be such freaks, born out of their time, since time is

not absolute and must sometimes be mocked. But this is not for us.

The things we handle are dark and heavy, the bars are thick, and

age wears us out. We need crutches and cannot afford to be too

proud to accept them from the hands of men no better than

ourselves. With them, we may hope to hobble over such rickety

bridges as remain undestroyed.

What does a cripple feel, with fire or flood behind him and a

jostling crowd making for the only exit, if someone wantonlyknocks his crutch away and then destroys the bridge that led to

safety? Rage, surely. And if men knew what they have lost through

the well-intentioned activities of the crutch-snatchers and bridge-

destroyers their rage would make the anger of warring armies and

revolutionary mobs seem kittenish.


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The principal function of Western thought has been, over a long

period, the destruction of superstition, a term whichthough it

may sometimes be applied only to little habits and rituals which

have survived in isolation from the doctrines in terms of which they

once made sensesoon expands to include every form of belief

in the supernatural or in any reality beyond the reach of our

senses. Bridges, ladders and also the highroads provided by the

great religions have at least one thing in common : they are

invisible to those in whom this belief has been destroyed. It is

difficult to measure wickedness and define its degrees, but those

who have set themselves to persuade their fellow men that the

world is nothing but a meaningless agglomeration of materialparticles (or a blind interaction of minute quanta of energy) totally

separate from mans inner being have done a thing beside which

no massacre of the innocents can stand comparison. Like the

former Commandant of Auschwitz, these destroyers of bridges

have, for the most part, been well-behaved, keeping their fingers

off their neighbours goods and their neighbours wives: and this,

as much as anything, makes current notions of goodness and

morality seem infantile. If those who do the most harm go

unpunished, how can we bring ourselves to condemn the thief

and the murderer?

But if wickedness can be definedas it may bein terms of a

half-witted pursuit of good, a pursuit without regard for time, place

or circumstance, then it must be said that much of this wreckinghas been done in the name of the most splendid of ideals, the

ideal of perfection. And the idealist, the perfectionist, cannot

tolerate what is grimy or flawed or broken. He must change it at

once or, if it cannot be changed, he must destroy it. But our world

is by definition and by necessity a grimy, flawed and broken

place, subject to decay and riddled with death. If it were

otherwise it would not be the world orto put the matter another

waythis universe of time and space would be indistinguishable


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from the timeless perfection of Paradise and would therefore lose

its separate existence. It can be rendered transparent, so that the

light of what is perfect is discerned behind its shapes and patterns,

and it can be loved so that its very deformities become the

objects of a redeeming passion, but it cannot be changed or

mended at its own level.

At the root of modern idealism, with its refusal to accept

imperfection as something inherent in the human condition, there

lies a basic and perhaps satanic puritanism which, carried to its

logical conclusion, would set fire to this world of ours and destroy itutterly.

You can work miracles, said one of his companions to the

Muslim saint, Hallaj; Can you bring me an apple from heaven?

The saint raised his hand and, within the instant, held in it an apple

which he offered to his companion. Biting into the fruit, the man

observed with horror that there was a worm in it. That, said

Hallaj, is because, in passing from the eternal realm into the world

of time it has taken on something of the latters corruptibility.

This story has a particular bearing upon contemporary attitudes to

such traditional and religious bridges as still remain relatively intact

in the modern world. When they are not being undermined by thescientific view, they are being condemned on account of the

corruption which has infiltrated their structure; or, indeed,

undermining may go hand-in-hand with condemnation so that

they suffer the combined assault of rationalist and moralist. The

man who is ready enough to admit his own imperfections and to

acknowledge that evil cannot be eradicated from the conditions

of human life may still seek for a kind of primordial purity in religion

and primordial virtue in its priests or exponents, demanding that


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apples from heaven should forever retain the incorruptibility of

their origin. As a fallen being himself, he might be expected to

know better.

Whatever is fleshed must in some measure take on the limitations

of its medium and become subject to the laws which govern the

context of its incarnation. A Divine Revelation, fleshed in

concepts, in an organisation, in rituals and in rules of conduct,

cannot be immune to the process of limitation and decay, even

though the grace and power which lie at the kernel of its

manifestation remain by their nature untainted as does theultimate and innermost essence of man himself. And because we

are what we are and the world is what it is, grace and power can

be tapped only by those who have enough love and humility in

them to embrace the outer shell, twisted as it has been by so

many human hands and crusted with the grime of centuries, until,

like the fairy tale Princess who, by a kiss, changes a misshapen

monster into a fair young Prince, they find what was always there,

in the kernel, at the centre, only waiting to be re-awakened. And

from this point of view the shortcomings of any religion as it

appears to the outsider and the scandal created by some of its

representativesfornicating priests, corrupt Imams, thieving

Sadhusmight be compared to the trials and tests which the

heroes of mythology had to surmount before they reached the

goal of all desire.

From another point of view it might be said that if religious

institutions (and the ritual and mythological complexes of

primitive peoples) did not reek of humanity, they would perhaps

seem too alien, too abstract and, indeed, too pure for the likes of

us. It is because they are so well integrated into our natural and

organic existence and because they have a homely, familiar

smell that they are of use as bridges over which ordinary people


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may pass from this shore to the other, unfamiliar one. And this is

what the puritan, intoxicated with his own idealism, cannot admit :

he finds it intolerable that plaster saints and household gods and

desert tombs should serve as bridges and that a God who is said

to be almighty and transcendent should so demean Himself as to

permit his grace and power to operate through such trivial

instruments, forgetting that this same God is also said to be

omnipresent, that nothing therefore is trivial and that men are free

to find Him where they can.

The Divine Presence within thingsin sticks and stones and bitsand piecesimplies their wholeness, but men who are themselves

fragmented between mind, emotion and sense cannot hope to

recognise this wholeness (except as an idea). And in the

idealists disgust and alienation, his refusal to stoop and make use

of small, imperfect things lies one of the primary betrayals of mans

viceregality. For the Viceroy is a builder of bridges, and these men

are concerned only to destroy. Obsessed by ideas of neatness

and symmetry, they take their scissors and snip away at the world

picture like a child who, when he tries to make his cut-out figure

perfectly symmetrical, cuts first on one side, then on the other

andstill unable to get it rightgoes on until nothing is left. They

seek a false perfection and an impossible symmetry through a

process of reduction. All that does not fit must be eliminated.

But, in the long run, nothing fits their categories. Everything must

go.

The explanation of the world by a series of reductions has an aim

in view: to rid the world of extra-mundane values. It is a systematic

banalisation of the world undertaken for the purpose of

conquering and mastering it. But the conquest of the world is

notin any case was not till half a century agothe purpose of all

human societies. It is an idiosyncrasy of Western man.[4]


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Against this is to be set the vast, untidy bulk of all that man can be

and know and do, sprawling across a creation open to the four

quarters. The frontiers of what is knowable then extend to thefurthest limits of creation and beyond, but the frontiers of what

can be comprehended, defined and explained in rational terms

and within the contours of the mental faculty are narrowed. The

safety of little, day-to-day certainties and the comfort of seeing a

needle on a dial move as it was expected to move must be

sacrificed before we can escape the closed circle of our own

limited existence and enjoy what we are free to enjoy.

But if what is ultimately knowable cannot be cut down to size and

explained in the common language of our kind, it can in some

measure be lived and acted outin stories, in symbols and in

ritesso that things fall into place, the local is related to the

universal and the scattered fragments of our existence are re-

assembled into a whole that makes sense.

NOTES

[1] Echelle de Jacob : Gustav Thibon, p. 177.


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[2] Quran, 41.53.

[3] Images de l'Esprit : Frithjof Schuon (Flammarion) pp. 15-16.

[4] The Two and the One : Mircea Eliade (Harwell Press). pp. 156-

157.

Documents

Knowledge and Its Counterfeit by Gai Eaton