Although I strongly agree with much, if not most, of what Schuon has written, I could never have been a formal student, and besides, he would never have had me. For where we disagree, we really disagree.
A case in point is on the question of Progress. Let's start with whether or not it exists, and in what sense. Certainly it doesn't exist in the "progressive" sense, but progressivism nevertheless ironically proves the existence of progress, in that it causes it to go backward, precisely (whether in academia, aesthetics, aberrant sexuality, antiracism, autocracy, illegal aliens -- and that's just the A's).
A case in point would be energy production and all it entails (and it entails a great deal more than you might realize, cf. the highly raccoommended The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, by Alex Epstein; I see that he has a sequel coming out in April, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas -- Not Less).
Under President Trump we made tremendous progress in this area, while under Brandon we have executed a U-turn and careened backward in the name of "progress" in order to combat the wholly imaginary Existential Crisis of Catastrophic Climate Change.
This post could veer in any number of insultaining directions, but let's stay focused.
For Schuon, progress "is the very negation of any celestial origin"; it tends to give with one hand what it yoinks with the other, and he's not wrong:
All too often things which some people call “useful” are anything but useful in their results. “Progress” is healing a paralytic while depriving him of his sight.
More often than not progress is simply
the exchange of one evil for another, otherwise our age would be perfect and sanctified. In the world of man, as it is in itself, it is scarcely possible to choose a good; one is always reduced to the choice of a lesser evil, and in order to determine which evil is the less, there is no alternative but to relate the question to a hierarchy of values derived from eternal realities, and that is exactly what “our age” never does.
But the question is whether this eternal standard is in past or in the future; ultimately it goes to the nature of time itself, and whether time brings only deterioration and distance from this ideal, or whether this ideal is in the future.
Now we're getting somewhere, i.e., this post is making a bit of progress.
I've been thinking about this question as a result of reading a book called The Lord of History, which I cannot recommend. Another placeholder, as it were, while I wait for the mailman to bring me something better. Nevertheless, let's make the most of the teacher God has given us: give us this day our daily bread.
I suppose it really comes down to whether time is reversible or irreversible. Interestingly, physics itself can't fully account for time's irreversibility, at least last time I checked.
I just googled this:
While we take for granted that time has a given direction, physicists don’t: most natural laws are 'time reversible' which means they would work just as well if time was defined as running backwards (https://www.sciencealert.com/what-is-time-and-why-does-it-move-forward).
Nevertheless, as we all know from everyday experience, time
has a direction, you always move forward, never in reverse. So why is the dimension of time irreversible? This is one of the major unsolved problems in physics.
The second law of thermodynamics is relevant, as is the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics. Still, these don't get us very far in explaining the gap between baboons and Beethoven.
At any rate, when Christianity first made its appearance on the world stage, it was antagonistic to Greek thought, wherein the divine "consists in the unmoved eternal order of Ideas":
Immutable law, whether of nature or of society, represents to the senses the changeless eternity of the intelligible world. The phenomenon of movement itself is an imitation of immobility, being conceived as cyclical, both in the regular motions of the heavenly bodies and in the eternal recurrence which governs the course of history, so that the same events will be everlastingly repeated.
By going round in a circle, even change thus conforms to the stable eternity of the ideal world, and no longer implies innovation (Danielou).
In ancient thought, there's no way around this depressingly absurcular roundness of temporality. No progress for you!
The opposition is fundamental between this conception and the Christian belief in a unique, irrevocable value belonging to the historical Incarnation.
It seems that the Incarnation includes and redeems history, which is convenient, since man cannot be man without existing in and as history. Moreover,
It is this belief in the irreversibility of salvation that gives rise to the Christian virtue of hope, in contrast to the characteristic melancholy which flows from the Greek acceptance of an endless repetition.
Speaking of which, this reminds me of something Champlain observed about the Indians, who, like other pagan peoples, were condemned to Nietzche's Eternal Return: on the one hand, Champlain "always regarded them as human beings like himself, and remarked on their intelligence. Often he commented on their physique and appearance, which was superior to European contemporaries." And yet...
"And yet they are somewhat saturnine."
By saturnine, writes Fischer, Champlain "meant that they had an undertone of melancholy." This "interested him, and he reflected much on it." I don't know what he concluded, but depression and hopelessness are always conjoined.
I don't recall Schuon writing anything about hope and history, but Dávila provides a number of helpful hints:
For history to be of concern to us, there must be something in it that transcends it: There must be something in history more than history.
Nothing that satisfies our expectations fulfills our hopes.
History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination.
If history made sense, the Crucifixion would be superfluous.
Christ was in history like a point on a line. But his redemptive act is to history as the center is to the circumference.
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