Over two thousand years ago in China the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu said:
‘The knowledge of the ancients was perfect. How perfect? At first they did not yet know that there were things (apart from Tao, the Way, which signifies the Eternal and Infinite). This is the most perfect knowledge; nothing can be added. Next, they knew that there were things, but did not yet make distinctions between them. Next they made distinctions between them but they did not yet pass judgements upon them. When judgements were passed, [the knowledge of the Tao] was destroyed." 19

The meeting point of the two natures, the summit of the soul which is also its centre—for the Kingdom of Heaven is ‘within’ as well as above’—is what most religions name the Heart (written here throughout with a capital to distinguish it from the centre of the body); and the Heart is the throne of the Intellect in the sense in which Intellectus was used throughout the Middle Ages, that is, the ‘solar’ faculty which perceives spiritual truths directly unlike the Junar’ faculties of reason, memory and imagination, which are the differentiated reflections of the Intellect.
In virtue of ‘the marriage of the Moon and the Sun’ the outbranching, separative ‘knowledge of good and evil’ was completely subordinated to the inward-pointing, unitive Heart-knowledge which refers all creatures back to their Creator. ‘The cutting of the Moon in two’ denotes the separation of Heart and mind, of Intellect and reason, and man’s consequent loss of direct, unitive knowledge and his subjection to the dualism of indirect knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil.
It was mental independence, represented by ‘the Moon straying alone’, which brought with it the possibility of purely profane impulses and actions. There was nothing spiritual in the Moons forsaking the greater light for the lesser, just as there was nothing spiritual in the impulse which caused Pandora to open her box, or 1n that which caused the eating of the forbidden fruit; and the significance of this last act may be further understood in the light of the Zoroastrian religion according to which one stage in the corruption of man is marked by the enjoyment of food for its own sake and the failure to attribute its goodness to the Creator. 20

1. See Midrash Rabbah on Genesis IV, 26 (Soncino Press, London, 1939), vol. 1, p. 196. In one sense—for a sacred text has always been held to be a synthesis of different meanings at different levels—the story of Adam, Cain and Abel comprises the whole history of mankind: today the transgression of Cain is almost complete, the nomads having been almost altogether put out of existence by the town dwellers (see René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Ch. 21, Sophia Perennis, Ghent, NY, 1995). From this point of view it may be said that a new allegory begins with the Adam-Seth narrative. But from another point of view, if Cain as it were recapitulates the fall and personifies all the ‘worldly wisdom’ which resulted from it, and if Abel stands for the loss of Eden, personifying the repentance of Adam and his expiation, Seth represents the relenting of God towards Adam and the establishment of the Golden Age. 21

Kalki, the name of this last and tenth Avatara, is represented a riding on a white horse, sword in hand, and some descriptions him bear a marked resemblance to verses in the Apocalypse. Th Kalki Avatara is expected to put an end to the Dark Age, and to inaugurate a new cycle with a Golden Age. 22

In Hinduism this faculty of transcendent vision is represented in statues and other forms of sacred art by a third eye placed in the middle of the forehead. In Christianity and Islam it is named the ‘Eye of the Heart’ which in Arabic, the sacred language of Islam, means also ‘the Fountain of the Heart’, and it is at this fountain that the soul drinks the ‘Elixir of Life’ In Christianity also the two symholisms are combined, for there is a tradition that when Lucifer fell from Heaven his frontal eye dropped to earth in the form of an emerald, which was then carved into the cup of the Holy Grail. 25

There is still a difference between calling a man ‘brainy and calling him intellectual, for this last word retains a suggestion of something mysteriously exalted—hence its value for purposes of pretension, Similarly, when a dictator of the former Soviet Union spoke of the ‘material and spiritual benefits of Communism; he preferred to uttey a contradiction in terms (for a Communist, by definition, does not believe in the Spirit) than submit to the inglorious banality of expressing what he really meant; and further West, humanists, whether atheists or agnostics, are just as unwilling to give up the word ‘spiritual’, which still plays an important part in their rhetoric. Nor is there any lack today of artists and art critics who, when a work of art is nebulously devoid of meaning, will unhesitatingly describe it as ‘mystical’. 26

The Qualities are represented in Islamic doctrine as being of two kinds, Qualities of Majesty and Qualities of Beauty, and this accords with what other religions teach, implicitly if not expressly, about the Divine Perfection.1 The highest ideal on the human plane may therefore be defined as majesty and beauty of soul, to which mustbe added, in the very nature of things, holiness and humility,’2—holiness in virtue of the soul’s direct contact with the Spirit, and humility because only the soul which has access to the Spirit is fully conscious, by comparison, of the limitations of the soul as such.
. . .
1. In the Far Eastern tradition these two aspects of Divinity are symbolized respectively by the dragon and the phoenix, in the Greco-Roman tradition by the eagle and the peacock.
2. In Christianity these two virtues, as also majesty and beauty, are reflected in the double name Jesu-Maria. 32

Holiness, ‘wholeness’ and ‘health’ are in origin the same word and have merely been differentiated in form and in meaning through the fragmentation of language. 33

34-35

1. Our mediaeval ancestors knew well what Plato knew when he said, even of his ideal state (and they were very far from considering their state ideal) ‘Everything which is generated is liable to corruption; neither will such a constitution as this remain forever but be dissolved’ Nor would they have been unduly surprised at the turn things have taken this century, for in explaining how his theocracy would inevitably be overthrown and in tracing the stages of degeneration through which the state would pass, Plato mentions ‘democracy and ‘dictatorship’ as the two lowest possible forms of government, the one tending to lead to the other, dictatorship’ being, in his conception, the rule of an unprincipled demagogue who is swept into power upon a wave of reaction against the chaos of democracy. 49

‘Faith is necessary for religions, but it ceases to be so for those who go further and who achieve self-realization in God. Then one no longer believes because one sees. There is no longer any need to believe when one sees the Truth. Between such vision and the lowest degree of belief there are many intermediary degrees of intuition, 1. Shaikh Ahmad al-‘Alawi. See Martin Lings, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century (The Islamic Texts Society, 1993), p. 33. 51
certainty and faith. 52 51-52

On the other hand if religion, representing the Intellect, demands that man shall accept its authority for all that lies beyond the scope of reason, it never demands that he shall accept what is against reason. 53

The rationalist thinks by definition in two dimensions only, for his mind is ‘free’, having ‘thrown off the chains of superstition, and these chains, by which reason is tethered to the Intellect, are what make the soul’s third dimension. Hence the cult of many conceptions which have in themselves as it were only two dimensions, like Statistics, for example, which are so dear to the modern world; and among the experts of two dimensional thought must be counted many of the representatives of so-called ‘higher learning’ It is ironical that this term should be used precisely today when increase of knowledge beyond a certain point comes no longer as it used to by ‘multiplication, that is, by ennobling length and breadth with the dimension of height, but by division’ that is, endlessly subdividing a flat surface into more and more minute compartments, in a purely quantitative accumulation of insignificant facts which have escaped the notice—and the interest—of previous generations. 55 #education

The modern civilization is not merely the death-agony of the Christian civilization. It is also a prolongation of the death-agony of the Greco-Roman civilization which, having been cut short by Christianity, was reborn’ at the Renaissance. Since then the Western world has remanifested, with a vengeance’ if one likes to put it that way, its tendency to be distracted from the great truths of the Universe by what it calls ‘reality’, that is, two-dimensional facts, mainly of a material order. 57

It is true that much if not most of the modern interest in other religions or tolerance of them, far from being based on mutual understanding, is merely the result of academic curiosity or of religious apathy combined with ‘the superstition of freedom. None the less, there are some devout Christians, for example, who need to know, and whose Christian faith is greatly strengthened by the knowledge, that Buddhism is as much a religion as Christianity is, 62 that for more than the last two thousand years it has served the ritual needs of millions of Asiatics far better, presumably, than hristianity could have done. They need to know this because to think otherwise, in their present-day acute awareness of other religions, is to think ill of Providence, and therefore, ultimately, to think ll of Christianity which entirely depends for its glory upon the Glory of God. In more general terms, they need to know, before their soulscan be at rest in any one religion, that the Divine Name All-Merciful’ is no empty word, and that it is not merely one people or one group of peoples that God has ‘chosen’; and although it has never been hidden from those who needed to see it, this truth is now probably more accessible than ever before.
It is significant that it was a Pope of our times, and not of any other tumes, who said to a delegate he was sending to an Islamic country: Do not think that you are going among infidels. Muslims attain to Salvation. The ways of God are infinite."
For some people who have lost or half lost their own religion there is, or can be, a way of return to it through the help of other religions, since it is often easier to look at these objectively and without prejudice;
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1. These words, spoken in confidence by Pope Pius XI to Cardinal Facchinetti whomnhe had just appointed Apostolic Delegate to Libya, were only made public towards the end of the papacy of Pope Pius XII (in L’Ultima, Anno VIII, 75-76, p. 261, Florence, 1954). 63 62-63

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