René Guénon - The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

On the other hand, although the principial unity is absolutely indivisible, it can nevertheless be said to be of an extreme complexity, since it contains ‘eminently’ all that constitutes the essence or qualitative side of manifested beings, when considered from the point of view of a ‘descent’ into lower degrees. It is enough to go back to the explanation given above of the way in which the ‘extinction of the ego’ ought to be understood in order to see that unity is that wherein all quality subsists, ‘transformed’ and in its fullness, and that distinction, freed from all ‘separative’ limitation, is indeed carried therein to its highest level. As soon as the domain of manifested existence is entered, limitation appears in the form of the particular conditions that determine each state or each mode of manifestation; in the course of a descent to ever lower levels of existence limitation becomes ever narrower, and the possibilities inherent in the nature of beings become more restricted in range, which amounts to saying that the essence of these beings is correspondingly simplified; this simplification continues progressively toward a lower level than that of existence itself, that is to say toward the domain of pure quantity, where it is finally brought to its maximum through the complete suppression of every qualitative determination.

Thus it can be seen that simplification follows strictly the descending course which, in current terms as inspired by Cartesian dualism, would be described as leading from ‘spirit’ toward ‘matter’: inadequate as these terms may be as substitutes for ‘essence’ and ‘substance’, they can perhaps usefully be employed here for the sake of better understanding. It is therefore all the more extraordinary that anyone should attempt to apply this kind of simplification to things that belong to the ‘spiritual’ domain itself, or at least to as much of it as people are still able to conceive, for they go so far as to extend it to religious conceptions as well as to philosophical or scientific conceptions. The most typical example is that of Protestantism, in which simplification takes the form both of an almost complete suppression of rites, together with an attribution of predominance to morality over doctrine; and the doctrine itself becomes more and more simplified and diminished so that it is reduced to almost nothing, or at most to a few rudimentary formulas that anyone can interpret in any way that suits him. Moreover, Protestantism in its many forms is the only religious production of the modern spirit, and it arose at a time when that spirit had not yet come to the point of rejecting all religion, but was on the way toward doing so by virtue of the anti-traditional tendencies which are inherent in it and which really make it what it is. At the end-point of this ‘evolution’ (as it would be called today), religion is replaced by ‘religiosity’, that is to say by a vague sentimentality having no real significance; it is this that is acclaimed as ‘progress’, and it shows clearly how all normal relations are reversed in the modern mentality, for people try to see in it a ‘spiritualization’ of religion, as if the ‘spirit’ were a mere empty frame or an ‘ideal’ as nebulous as it is insignificant. This is what some of our contemporaries call a ‘purified religion’, but it is so only insofar as it is emptied of all positive content and has no longer any connection with any reality whatsoever.

Another thing worth noting is that all the self-styled ‘reformers’ constantly advertise their claim to be returning to a ‘primitive simplicity’, which has certainly never existed except in their imaginations. This may sometimes only be a convenient way of hiding the true character of their innovations, but it may also very often be a delusion of which they themselves are the victims, for it is frequently very difficult to determine to what extent the apparent promoters of the anti-traditional spirit are really conscious of the part they are playing, for they could not play it at all unless they themselves had a twisted mentality. Furthermore, it is difficult to see how the claim to primitive simplicity can be reconciled with the idea of ‘progress’, of which they simultaneously claim to be agents; the contradiction is enough by itself to indicate that there is something really abnormal in all this. However that may be, and confining attention to the idea of ‘primitive simplicity’, there seems to be no reason whatever why things should always begin by being simple and continue to get more complex: on the contrary, considering that the germ of any being must necessarily contain the virtuality of all that the being will be in the future, so that all the possibilities to be developed in the course of its existence must be included in the germ from the start, the conclusion that the origin of all things must really be exceedingly complex is inevitable. This gives an exact picture of the qualitative complexity of essence; the germ is small only in relation to quantity or substance, and by symbolically transposing the idea of ‘size’ it can be deduced through inverse analogy that what is least in quantity must be greatest in quality. [41] The Gospel parable of the mustard seed may be recalled here, as also the similar texts from the Upanishads quoted elsewhere (see Man and His Becoming according to the Vedānta , chap. 3), and it may also be added in this connection that the Messiah himself is called ‘Seed’ in a number of biblical passages. In a similar way every tradition at its origin contains the entire doctrine, comprehending in principle the totality of the developments and adaptations that may legitimately proceed from it, together with the totality of the applications to which they may give rise in all domains; human interventions can do nothing but restrict and diminish it, if they do not denature it altogether, and the work of all ‘reformers’ really consists in nothing more than that.

Another peculiar thing is that modernists of all sorts (taking into account not those of the West alone, but also those of the East, for the latter are in any case merely ‘Westernized’), while they boast of doctrinal simplicity as representing ‘progress’ in the field of religion, often speak as if religion ought to have been made for idiots, or at least as if they supposed that the people they are speaking to must inevitably be idiots; do they really think that by asserting, rightly or wrongly, that a doctrine is simple they are suggesting to a man of the most moderate intelligence a valid reason for adopting it? This is in the end no more than a manifestation of the ‘democratic’ idea, in the light of which, as was said earlier, it is desired that science too shall be ‘within the reach of all’. It is scarcely necessary to remark that these same ‘modernists’ are always, as a necessary consequence of their attitude, the declared enemies of all esoterism, for it goes without saying that esoterism, which is by definition only the concern of an elect, cannot be simple, so that its negation appears as an obligatory first stage in all attempts at simplification. As for religion properly so called, or more generally the exterior part of any tradition, it must admittedly be such that everyone can understand something of it, according to the range of his capacity, and in that sense it is addressed to all; but this does not mean that it must therefore be reduced to such a minimum that the most ignorant (this word not being used with reference to profane instruction, which has no importance here) or the least intelligent can grasp it: quite to the contrary, there must be in it something that is so to speak at the level of the possibilities of every individual, however exalted they may be, for thus alone can it furnish an appropriate ‘support’ to the interior aspect which, in any unmutilated tradition, is its necessary complement and belongs wholly to the initiatic order. But the modernists, in specifically rejecting esoterism and initiation, thereby deny that religious doctrines contain in themselves any profound significance; thus it is that, in their pretension to ‘spiritualize’ religion, they fall into its opposite, the narrowest and crudest ‘literalism’, in which the spirit is most completely lacking, thus affording a striking example of the fact that what Pascal said is often all too true — ‘He who tries to play the angel plays the beast.’