Light on the Ancient Worlds: A Brief Survey of the Book by Frithjof Schuon
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As the title suggests, this book aims at providing the reader with keys necessary for the understanding of the ancient worlds and for ridding oneself of prejudices widely spread in modern thought.
Chapter 1: Light on Ancient Worlds
This slideshow is a glance at the chapters in the book Light on the Ancient Worlds by the eminent Perennialist/Traditionalist writer Frithjof Schuon, published in a new edition by World Wisdom in 2006. Each slide selects an excerpt from the successive chapters.
The first chapter, from which the book gets its title, begins by mentioning the two key ideas that dominated the whole existence of ancient peoples: the ideas of Center and Origin. The sacred Center and the sacred Origin are the connections in space and time of a given people with Heaven. Schuon then explains the consequences of these ideas in many aspects of ancient civilizations, among them the political order:
The purpose of ancient imperialism was to spread an “order”, a state of equilibrium and stability which conforms to a divine model and which is in any case reflected in nature, notably in the planetary world; the Roman emperor, like the monarch of the “Celestial Middle Kingdom”, wields his power thanks to a “mandate from Heaven”.…If the non-Roman peoples were considered “barbarians”, it is above all because they were outside the “order”; from the point of view of the Pax Romana, they manifested disequilibrium, instability, chaos, perpetual menace.… The modern idea of “civilization” is not without a connection, historically speaking, to the idea of “empire”; but the “order” has become purely human and entirely profane, as is proven in any case by the notion of “progress”, which is the very negation of any celestial origin; in fact, “civilization” is merely an urban refinement within the framework of a worldly and mercantile outlook. And this explains its hostility to virgin nature as well as to religion. According to the criteria of “civilization”, the contemplative hermit—who represents human spirituality and at the same time the sanctity of virgin nature—can only be a sort of “savage”, whereas in reality he is the earthly witness of Heaven. (Excerpted from page 2.)
Chapter 2: Fall and Forfeiture
In antiquity man was “objective,” being “little disposed to grant a determining role to psychological contingencies.” The fall to a subjective outlook had disastrous consequences for man’s ability to discern the real from the illusory, placing him outside of tradition and thus jeopardizing his ability to attain his ultimate (spiritual) goal.
When the modern world is contrasted with traditional civilizations, it is not simply a question of looking on each side for what is good and bad; since good and evil are everywhere, it is essentially a question of knowing on which side the lesser evil is to be found. If someone tells us that such and such a good exists outside tradition, we respond: no doubt, but it is necessary to choose the most important good, and this is necessarily represented by tradition; and if someone tells us that in tradition there exists such and such an evil, we respond: no doubt, but it is necessary to choose the lesser evil, and again it is tradition that contains it. It is illogical to prefer an evil that involves some benefits to a good that involves some evils.
Certainly, to confine oneself to admiring the traditional worlds is still to stop short at a fragmentary point of view, for every civilization is a “two-edged sword”; it is a total good only by virtue of those invisible elements that determine it positively. In certain respects, every human society is bad; if its transcendent character is entirely removed—which amounts to dehumanizing it since the element of transcendence is essential to man though always dependent upon his free consent—then at the same time society’s entire reason for being is removed.… (Excerpted from page 32.)
Chapter 3: The Dialogue between Hellenists and Christians
Schuon describes the opposition between Greeks and Christians as unreal to a great extent, since each was right on a certain plane. In a masterly way, he analyses the two points of view and deepens the reader’s understanding of both traditions:
If a simple and rather summary formulation be permissible, one could say that for the Greeks truth is that which is in conformity with the nature of things; for the Christians truth is that which leads to God. This Christian attitude, to the extent that it tended to be exclusive, was bound to appear to the Greeks as “foolishness”; in the eyes of the Christians the attitude of the Greeks consisted in taking thought for an end in itself, outside of any personal relation to God; consequently it was a “wisdom according to the flesh”, since it cannot by itself regenerate the fallen and impotent will, but on the contrary by its self-sufficiency draws men away from the thirst for God and for salvation. From the Greek point of view, things are what they are whatever we may make of them; from the Christian—to speak schematically and a priori—only our relationship to God makes sense. The Christians could be reproached for an outlook that was too much concerned with the will and too self-interested, and the Greeks on the one hand for too much liveliness of thought and on the other for too rational and too human a perfectionism; it was in some respects a dispute between a love-song and a mathematical theorem. It could also be said that the Hellenists were predominantly right in principle and the Christians in fact, at least in a particular sense that can be discerned without difficulty. (Excerpted from page 47.)
Chapter 4: American Indian Shamanism
What is the spiritual value of American Indian Shamanism? What are its foundations and main ideas? How is it different than and how is it similar to the great world religions? Schuon gives us many keys to penetrating this fascinating world.
What is the correct and concrete meaning of the Indian idea that everything is “animated”? In principle and metaphysically it means that there springs forth from each thing—from its existential center—an ontological ray that is made of “being”, “consciousness”, “life”, a ray which connects the object through its subtle or animistic root to its luminous and celestial prototype; from this it follows that it is possible for us to attain to the heavenly Essences by taking anything whatever as starting point. Things are coagulations of the divine Substance; the Substance is not things, but things are it, and they are so by virtue of their existence and their qualities; this is the profound meaning of the polysynthetic animism of the Indians, and it is this acute consciousness of the homogeneity of phenomenal worlds that explains their spiritual naturalism and also their refusal to detach themselves from nature and to become involved in a civilization made up of artifices and servitudes and carrying within itself the seeds of petrifaction as well as corruption; for the Indian as for the Far-Eastern, the human is within nature and not outside it. (Excerpted from page 64.)
Chapter 5: Tracing Mâyâ
This chapter deals with metaphysics in a more direct manner than the other chapters. The degree of understanding that a civilization has of metaphysics has critical implications:
The mission of man is to introduce the Absolute into the relative, if one may use so elliptical an expression; since man has all too often failed in his mission, this is also therefore the role of Revelation and the Avatâras as well as of miracles. In a miracle as in other theophanies, the veil of Mâyâ is symbolically torn; the miracle, the Prophet, wisdom are metaphysically necessary, for it is inconceivable that they should not appear within the world of man; and man himself comprises all these aspects in relationship to the terrestrial world, of which he is the center and opening toward Heaven, or pontifex. The meaning of human life — to paraphrase a Christian formula expressing reciprocity between man and God — is to realize that Âtmâ became Mâyâ that Mâyâ might become Âtmâ. (Excerpted from page 82.)
Chapter 6: Naïveté
One of the remarkable qualities of Schuon as a writer is his use of images to illustrate his point and to make the idea he is trying to convey very clear. His astonishing observations of the absurdity of current ideas are sometimes better conveyed through his illustrative analogies. In this chapter this brilliant skill comes to the surface several times, maybe because of the subject at hand which is the “accusation” of naïveté that modern man makes against our ancestors.
If the men of old sometimes appear ingenuous, it is often because they are considered from a distorted point of view, which is the result of a more or less generalized corruption; to accuse them of being naïve amounts to applying a law to them retroactively, to express ourselves in legal terms. Likewise, if an ancient writer can give the impression of simplemindedness, this is largely because he did not have to take account of a thousand errors still unknown nor of a thousand possibilities of misinterpretation, and also because there was no need for his dialectic to be like the Scottish dance between eggs, seeing that such an author could in a large measure dispense with nuances; words still possessed a freshness and a fullness—or a magic—which is difficult for us to imagine, living as we do in a climate of verbal inflation. (Excerpted from page 86.)
Chapter 7: Man in the Universe
When we look around, what do we see? For modern man, the answer generally would be “matter.” Schuon sees the manifestations of the state of Universal Substance: first, existence; second, differences; third, movements, modifications, transformations; and fourth, disappearances.
Modern science, which is rationalist as to its subject and materialist as to its object, can describe our situation physically and approximately, but it can tell us nothing about our extra-spatial situation in the total and real Universe. Astronomers know more or less where we are in space, in what relative “place”, in which of the peripheral arms of the Milky Way, and perhaps they may know where the Milky Way is situated among other assemblages of star-dust; but they do not know where we are in existential “space”, namely, in a state of hardening and at the center or summit of it, while at the same time being on the edge of an immense “rotation”, which is none other than the current of forms, the “samsaric” flow of phenomena, the panta rhei *
of Heraclitus. Profane science, in seeking to pierce to its depths the mystery of the things that contain—space, time, matter, energy—forgets the mystery of the things that are contained: it tries to explain the quintessential properties of our bodies and the intimate functioning of our souls, but it does not know what existence and intelligence are; consequently, given its principles, it cannot be otherwise than ignorant of what man is. (Excerpted from page 86.)
* The Greek term panta rhei can be translated as “Everything is in flux,” or “Everything is (always) flowing,” or “Everything is (constantly) in a state of change.”
Chapter 8: The Universality and Timeliness of Monasticism
Expounding on the metaphysical roots of monasticism, Schuon reflects on hermits and society, in the past and in the present:
A monk will certainly never blame anyone simply for living in the world; this is self-evident, given the existence of secular clergy and lay saints; what is blameworthy is not living “in the world”, but living in it badly and thus in a certain sense creating it. When anyone reproaches a hermit or a monk for “fleeing” the world, he commits a double error: first, he loses sight of the fact that contemplative isolation has an intrinsic value independent of the existence of a surrounding “world”; second, he pretends to forget that there are forms of flight which are perfectly honorable: if it is neither absurd nor shameful to do one’s best to escape an avalanche, it is no more so to run away from the temptations or even simply the distractions of the world, or from our own ego to the extent it is rooted in this vicious circle.…
It is metaphysically impossible to give oneself to God without this resulting in something good for the environment; to give oneself to God—though it were hidden from all—is to give oneself to man, for this gift of self has a sacrificial value of an incalculable radiance.
From another point of view, to work for one’s own salvation is like breathing, eating, sleeping; one cannot do these things for anyone else nor help anyone else by abstaining from them. Egoism is taking away from others what they need; it is not taking for oneself something of which they know nothing or for which they have no desire. (Excerpted from page 102)
Chapter 9: Keys to the Bible
The importance of the ideas of symbolism and revelation and their role in understanding the Bible are the main theme of this chapter:
But clearly the most important basis for what we have just spoken of is the admission that a world of intelligible light exists, both underlying and transcending our consciousness; the knowledge of this world, or this sphere, entails as a consequence the negation of all psychologism and likewise all evolutionism. In other words, psychologism and evolutionism are nothing but the makeshift hypotheses to compensate for the absence of this knowledge.
To affirm then that the Bible is both symbolistic and revealed means, on the one hand, that it expresses complex truths in a language that is indirect and full of imagery and, on the other, that its source is neither the sensorial world nor the psychological or rational plane, but rather a sphere of reality that transcends these planes and immensely envelops them, while yet in principle being accessible to man through the intellective and mystical center of his being, or through the “heart”, if one prefers, or pure “Intellect”. It is the intellect which comprises in its very substance the evidence for the sphere of reality that we are speaking of and which thus contains the proof of it, if this word can have a meaning in the domain of direct and participative perception. (Excerpted from page 117)
Chapter 10: Religio Perennis
In this final chapter, Schuon talks about separative discernment and unitive concentration; doctrine and method; faith and love. These elements are essential in all spirituality worthy of the name:
The essential function of human intelligence is discernment between the Real and the illusory or between the Permanent and the impermanent, and the essential function of the will is attachment to the Permanent or the Real. This discernment and this attachment are the quintessence of all spirituality; carried to their highest level or reduced to their purest substance, they constitute the underlying universality in every great spiritual patrimony of humanity, or what may be called the religio perennis; this is the religion to which sages adhere, one which is always and necessarily founded upon formal elements of divine institution. (Excerpted from pages 119-120)
Excerpts from the appendix of previously unpublished writings of Frithjof Schuon:
Man is situated between the inner and the outer just as the Logos is situated between God and the world and as Being is situated between Beyond-Being and Existence: hence between the Essence and the Logos.
On the one hand, to contemplate God in the inward and to recognize His reflections in the outward; on the other hand, to manifest Him in the outward while launching oneself toward Him in the inward.
When the inner dimension takes precedence over the outer, man will no longer undergo the tyranny of phenomena, but at the same time he will see them with the eye of inwardness: positive phenomena will be for him messengers of the inward and factors of interiorization. When one knows that beauty comes from the inward and bears witness to the inward, one will seek it in the inward. “The Kingdom of God is within you.” (Excerpted from page 132)
