« I feel convinced there will come a day when physiologists, poets and
philosophers will all speak the same language and understand one
another. »
(Claude Bernard)
The greatest evil of our times is the fact that science and religion appear
as two hostile forces that cannot be reconciled with each other. It is an
intellectual evil, all the more pernicious because it comes from above and
filters quietly, though surely, into the minds of all, like a subtle poison
breathed in with the very air around us. Every evil that affects the
intelligence becomes, in the long run, one that injures the soul, and finally
social in its nature.
So long as Christianity ingenuously affirmed the Christian faith in the
midst of a Europe which was still semi-barbarous, as in the Middle Ages, it was
the mightiest of moral forces; it formed the soul of present-day humanity. So
long as experimental science, frankly established on a fresh basis in the sixteenth
century, did nothing but claim the legitimate rights of reason and its own
boundless liberty, it was the greatest of intellectual forces; for it renewed
the very face of the world, freed man from age-long bonds and offered an
indestructible groundwork to the human mind.
But since the Church, no longer capable of proving her original dogma
against the objections of science, has shut herself up within this dogma as
within a windowless house, setting faith over against reason as an absolute
command, and one that it is impossible to dispute; since Science, dazzled by
her discoveries in the physical world, and forgetting the very existence of the
psychic and the intellectual worlds, has become agnostic in her methods and materialistic
both in her principles and in her goal; since Philosophy, bewildered and
powerless between the two, has, in a measure, abdicated her rights and fallen
away into a vague kind of scepticism, a profound rupture has been brought about
in the soul of society as well as in that of the individual.
This conflict, at first necessary and useful from the fact that it set
up the rights of reason and science, finally became a source of weakness and
decay. Religion responds to the needs of the heart, hence its eternal magic;
Science, to those of the spirit, hence its invincible might. These two powers,
however, have long been unable to come to a mutual understanding. Religion without
proof and Science without hope are now face to face, each challenging the
other, without being able to gain the victory.
Hence arises profound opposition, a secret war, not merely between
Church and State, but in Science herself, in the heart of all the Churches, and
even in the consciousness of all thinking individuals. For, whoever we are, to
whatever philosophic, aesthetic, or social school we belong, we bear within ourselves
these two hostile worlds that are apparently irreconcilable and spring from two
indestructible needs of mankind; the scientific and the religious. This state
of things, which has existed for over a century, has certainly contributed, in
no small degree, to the developing of human faculties, by setting them off
against one another. It has inspired poetry and music with accents of sublime
pathos and grandeur.
At the present tune, however, the prolonged and excessive tension has
produced the opposite result. It has reached a state of decline, of disgust and
weakness, just as, in the case of a patient, fever is followed by utter
dejection. Science concerns herself solely with the physical, the material
world; modem Philosophy has lost control of intelligence; and Religion still
rules the masses to some extent, though she reigns no longer in the upper
classes of society; ever great in charity, her faith has now grown dim.
The intellectual leaders of the day are thoroughly sincere and open unbelievers
or sceptics. But they have doubts of their very art, and look at one another
with a smile, as did the Roman augurs of old. Both in public and in private
they predict social catastrophes without seeking a remedy, or else they
enshroud their gloomy oracles in prudent and plausible language. Under such auspices,
literature and art have lost all understanding of the divine. No longer
accustomed to eternal vistas, most of our modem youth have dabbled in what
their new masters call naturalism, thus degrading the fair name of Nature. For what
they dignify with this title is nothing more than an apology for base
instincts, the slime and filth of vice, or else a complaisant portrayal of our
social platitudes; in a word, the systematic negation of both soul and
intelligence. And poor Psyche, having lost her wings, utters strange moans and
sighs, deep in the hearts of the very persons who insult and repudiate her.
As a result of materialism, positivism and scepticism, men of the present
time have reached a false conception of truth and progress. Our savants,
following with a wonderful degree of precision the experimental method of
Bacon, in the investigation of the visible universe, and obtaining the most
admirable results, have formed an idea of truth that is altogether external and
material. They think they approach truth in proportion as they amass large
numbers of facts. Within their province, they are quite right. What is really a
serious matter is that our philosophers and moralists have come to think in the
same way. In that case first causes and final ends can never be fathomed by the
mind of man.
Suppose, for instance, we knew exactly what is taking place, materially
speaking, in all the planets of the solar system —which, by the way, would form
an excellent basis of induction— suppose we even knew the kind of beings that
dwell in the satellites of Sirius and in several stars of the Milky Way. This
would most certainly be wonderful, all the same, would our knowledge thereby be
increased as to the total masses of stellar agglomerations, without speaking of
the nebula of Andromeda?
Thus, the present generation of men regards the development of humanity
as an eternal march towards a truth that is neither defined nor capable of
being defined, and is for ever inaccessible.
Such is the conception of the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte and
Herbert Spencer that has prevailed of recent years.
Now, Truth was something quite different for the sages and theosophists
of Greece and the East. They doubtless knew that it could not be compassed and
poised, without precise knowledge of the physical world; but they were also
aware that it has its dwelling, above all, within ourselves in the intellectual
principles and the spiritual life of the soul. For them the soul was the only,
the divine reality and the key that unlocked the universe. By concentrating their
will and developing its latent powers they attained to that living centre they
called God, whose light enables us to comprehend men and other living beings.
For them, what we call progress, i.e. the history of the world and of mankind,
was nothing else than the evolution in time and space of this central cause,
this final end.
If you regard these theosophists as mere visionaries, infirm dreamers,
or fakirs perched on columns, you are mistaken; the world has never known
greater men of action, in the fullest meaning of the term. They shine like
stars of the first magnitude in the heaven of souls. Their names are: Krishna,
Bouddha, Zoroaster, Hermes, Moses, Pythagoras, Jesus, and they were powerful
moulders of spirits, mighty quickeners of souls, and sane organizers of
societies. Living only for their one idea, ever prepared to meet death,
knowing, as they did, that death for truth is the one efficacious and supreme
deed, they established, first, sciences and religions, then literature and art,
all of which form the very sustenance and life of mankind. And what are the
positivism and the scepticism of the present day now producing?
A barren generation, devoid of ideal, light or faith, believing neither in
the soul, in God, nor in the future of the race; neither in this life nor in
the next, lacking in will-power, doubting both itself and human liberty.
“By their fruits ye shall know them,” said Jesus. This saying of the
Master of masters applies to teachings as well as to men. The thought is indeed
forced upon one: either truth is for ever inaccessible to man, or it has
largely been the monopoly, so to speak, of the mightiest of sages and the
greatest of initiates. It is to be found at the root of all great religions and
in the sacred books of all peoples. But one must know how to look for and
discover it therein.
If we examine the history of religions with eyes opened to the central
truth which interior initiation alone can give, we are filled with amaze. What
we see in no way resembles what is taught by the Church, which limits
revelation to Christianity alone and accepts it only in its primary
signification. And yet this bears but a faint resemblance to what is taught by
purely naturalistic science in the University of Paris, though the latter, on
the whole, takes a wider outlook. It brings all religions together and applies
to them one and the same method of investigation. Its erudition is profound and
its zeal most admirable, but it has not yet risen to the standpoint of comparative esoterism which shows forth the
history of religions and of humanity in an entirely new aspect. From these
heights let us now see what we can learn.
All great religions have an exterior and an interior history; the one
open to all, the other secret. By exterior history are meant the dogmas and
myths publicly taught in temples and schools, and recognized in popular worship
and superstitions. By interior history are meant the profound science, the
secret doctrine, the occult actions of the great initiates, prophets or reformers
who established, maintained and propagated these religions.
The first —official history, which any one may read— takes place in the
open glare of daylight; it is none the less on that account obscure, confused
and contradictory. The second, which may be called esoteric tradition or the
doctrine of the mysteries, is very difficult to discover. It takes place in the
heart of the temples, in the secret brotherhoods, and its most thrilling dramas
are worked out entirely in the souls of the great prophets who never entrusted
either to parchment or to disciples their supreme struggles, or divine flights
of ecstasy. It must be divined, though, when once seen, it shines forth,
luminous and organic, always in harmony with itself.
It might also be called the history of eternal, of universal religion. In
it is shown the reality of things; the obverse of human consciousness, of which
history affords us nothing but the slowly-elaborated reverse. Here we catch the
generating point of Religion and Philosophy which meet at the other end of the
ellipse in the entire realm of science. This point corresponds with
transcendental truths; we find therein the cause, origin and end of the
prodigious work of centuries — Providence in its terrestrial agents. This
history is the only one with which we are here concerned.
As for the Aryan race, its germ and nucleus are found in the Vedas. Its
first historic crystallization appears in the trinitarian doctrine of Krishna
which gives Brahmanism its peculiar power and the religion of India its own
indelible stamp. Buddha, who according to the chronology of the Brahmans came
two thousand four hundred years after Krishna, simply shows forth another side
of occult teaching, that of metempsychosis and of series of existences, bound
together by the law of Karma. Although Buddhism was a democratic, social and
moral revolution against aristocratic and sacerdotal Brahmanism, its
metaphysical basis is the same, though not so complete.
The antiquity of sacred teaching is no less striking in Egypt, whose traditions
date back to a civilization long previous to the appearance of the Aryan race
on the stage of history. One may suppose, even in these latter days, that the
trinitarian monism set forth in the Greek books of Hermes Trismegistus was a
compilation of the school of Alexandria brought about by the double influence
of Jewish Christianity and Neo-Platonism. By common consent, believers and unbelievers,
historians and theologians have never, hitherto, ceased to affirm this. At the
present time, this theory has fallen to pieces before the discoveries of Egyptian
epigraphy.
The fundamental authenticity of the books of Hermes as documents of the
ancient wisdom of Egypt has been triumphantly demonstrated by deciphered
hieroglyphs. Not only do the inscriptions on the stelae of Thebes and Memphis
confirm the whole chronology of Manetho, they also prove that the priests of
Amen-Râ taught metaphysics, though in another manner, on the banks of the
Ganges.(1)
One may say here, with the Hebrew prophet, that “the stone cries out of
the wall.” For, like the “midnight sun” which was said to shine on the Mysteries
of Isis and Osiris, the thought of Hermes, the ancient doctrine of the solar
word, was relit in the tombs of the kings, and shed its radiance even on the
papyrus of the Book of the Dead,
preserved by mummies four thousand years old.
In Greece esoteric thought is both more open and more veiled than
elsewhere; more open because it gambols and sports in the atmosphere of a
delightfully human mythology, because it flows like ambrosial blood in the
veins of this civilization and issues from the very pores of its Gods like
perfume or dew from heaven. On the other hand, the deep scientific thought that
brought all these myths into being, is often more difficult to grasp by reason
of their very seductiveness and the embellishments they have received from
poets.
The sublime principles, however, of Doric theosophy and Delphic wisdom
are inscribed in golden letters in Orphic fragments and the Pythagorean
synthesis, as also in the dialectical and rather fanciful vulgarization of
Plato. Finally, the school of Alexandria supplies us with useful
interpretations, for it was the first partially to publish and to comment on
the meaning of the mysteries in presence of the laxness of the Greek religion
and the rapid growth of Christianity.
The occult tradition of Israel coming down through Egypt, Chaldea and
Persia has been preserved for us in strange, obscure forms, though in all its
depth and extent, by the Kabalah or oral tradition from the Zohar and the Sepher Jezirah, attributed
to Simon Ben Jochai, and by the later commentaries of Maimonides. This
tradition, mysteriously concealed in Genesis and in the symbology of the prophets,
is strikingly manifested in the admirable work of Fabre d’Olivet on La Langue
hébraïque restituée, which aims at reconstructing the real cosmogony of
Moses, in Egyptian fashion, from the threefold meaning of each verse —almost of
each word— in the first ten chapters of Genesis.
As regards Christian esoterism, it scatters its rays of light over the Gospels,
already illumined by Essenian and Gnostic traditions. Like a living spring, it
gushes forth from the words of the Christ, from His parables, from the inmost
depths of that incomparable, that truly divine soul. At the same time, the Gospel
of Saint John gives us the key to the inner and sublime teaching of Jesus,
along with the meaning and import of its promise. Here we find the doctrine of
the Trinity and the Divine Word, which had been taught for thousands of years in
the temples of Egypt and India, exemplified in the person of the prince of
initiates, the greatest of the sons of God.
Accordingly the application of the method we have called comparative
esoterism to the history of religions, leads us to a very important result,
which may be formulated in these terms: the antiquity, continuity and essential
unity of esoteric teaching. It must be recognized that this is a remarkable
fact, as it takes for granted that sages and prophets belonging to the most
diverse ages have reached conclusions identical in substance though differing
in form, regarding the first and last of truths, and always along the same path
of interior initiation and meditation. Let us add, too, that these sages and
prophets have been the greatest benefactors of mankind, saviours whose
redeeming power has rescued men from the abyss of negation and of their own
lower nature.
After this, may it not be said that, as Leibnitz expresses it, there is
a kind of eternal philosophy, perennis
quadam phtlosophia, forming the
primordial link between science and religion, and the final unity of the two?
Ancient theosophy, as professed in India, Egypt and Greece, constituted
a veritable encyclopedia, generally divided into four categories:
1) Theogony or the science of absolute principles, identical with the
science of Numbers as applied to the universe, or sacred mathematics.
2) Cosmogony, the realization of eternal principles in time and space, or
involution of spirit in matter, periods of the world.
3) Psychology, the constitution of man, evolution of the soul through the
chain of existences.
4) Physics, the science of the kingdoms of terrestrial nature and of its
properties.
The inductive and experimental methods were combined and tested by one
another in these different orders of sciences, and to each of them there was a
corresponding art. These were, taking them in inverse order and beginning with
physical science:
- A special art of healing, based on knowledge of the occult properties of minerals, plants and animals; alchemy or the transmutation of metals, the disintegration and re-integration of matter by the universal agent, an art practised in ancient Egypt, according to Olympiodorus, who called it chrysopcea and argyropoea, the manufacture of gold and silver.
- The psychurgic arts corresponding to the forces of the soul, magic and divination.
- Celestial genethliacs or astrology, the art of discovering the relations between the destinies of nations or individuals, and the movements of the universe as denoted by the revolutions of the constellations.
- Theurgy, the supreme art of the magus, as rare as it is dangerous and difficult, that of bringing the soul into conscious relation with the different orders of spirits, and of acting upon them.
As may be seen, all science and art was comprised in this theosophy, issuing
from one common principle which I will call in present-day language
intellectual monism, evolutive and transcendental spiritualism. The essential
principles of esoteric doctrine may be formulated as follows:
Spirit is the only reality. Matter is nothing but its lower, changing,
ephemeral expression, its dynamism in space and time. Creation is eternal, it
continues just as life does. The microcosm-man is, by reason of his threefold
constitution (spirit, soul and body) the image and mirror of the macrocosm-universe
(divine, human and natural world), itself the product of the ineffable God, the
absolute Spirit which is in its nature: Father, Mother and Son (essence,
substance and life). It is for this reason that man, the image of God, can
become His living word.
Gnosis, or the rational mysticism of all times, is the art of finding
God in oneself, by developing the occult depths and latent powers of
consciousness. The human soul, the individuality, is immortal in its essence.
Its development takes place on a plane which alternately ascends and descends,
in existences that are spiritual and corporeal in turn. Reincarnation is the
law of its evolution. On reaching perfection it escapes from this law and
returns to pure Spirit, to God in the fullness of His consciousness. Just as
the soul rises above the law of the struggle for life when it becomes conscious
of its humanity, so also does it rise above the law of reincarnation, when it
becomes conscious of its divinity.
Immense is the prospect opening out to one who stands on the threshold
of theosophy, especially when compared with the narrow and dull horizon within
which man is confined by materialism, or with the childish data of clerical
theology so impossible of acceptance. On seeing it for the first time, one
feels dazed; the sense of the infinite proves overpowering. Unconscious depths
open within ourselves, showing us the abyss from which we are emerging and the
giddy heights to which we aspire. Entranced by this sense of immensity, though
terrified at the distance, we ask to be no more, we appeal to Nirvana!
Then we see that this weakness is nothing more than the weariness of the
mariner, ready to fling away his oar when the storm is at its height. It has
been said that man was born in the hollow of a wave and knows nothing of the
mighty ocean stretching before and behind him. This is true; but transcendental
mysticism drives our barque on to the crest of a wave, and there, continually
lashed by the furious tempest, we learn something of the sublimity of its
rhythm; and the eye, compassing the vault of heaven, finds rest in its calm
azure depths.
Surprise increases if, coming back to modem science, it is recognized
that, from the time of Bacon and Descartes, they tend involuntarily, though all
the more surely, to revert to the principles of ancient theosophy. Without
giving up the hypothesis of atoms, modem physics has insensibly come to
identify the idea of matter with that of force, a step towards spiritualistic
dynamism.
To explain light, magnetism and electricity, savants have been forced to
posit the existence of a matter which is subtle and absolutely imponderable,
filling space and penetrating all bodies, matter which they have called ether,
and this is a step in the direction of the ancient theosophical idea of the soul
of the world. The intelligent docility of this matter and its capacity for
receiving impressions are evident from Bell’s experiment which proves the transmission
of sound by light.(2)
Of all sciences, those which seem to have compromised spiritualism most
are comparative zoology and anthropology.
In reality they will prove to have served it by setting forth the laws
of the intelligible world in the animal one and the manner in which the former
affects the latter. Darwin put an end to the childish idea of creation held by
elementary theology. Here, he merely returned to the ideas of ancient
theosophy.
Pythagoras had already said: “Man is related to the animal.” Darwin
demonstrated the laws which nature obeys in following out the divine plan, and
these laws are: the struggle for life, heredity and natural selection. He
proved the variableness of species, reduced their number and fixed what might
be called their low-watermark. His disciples, however, the theorists of absolute
transform ism, who tried to prove that all species came from one prototype, and
that their appearance depended on nothing but the influences of environment,
have tried to show that facts favour a purely external and materialistic conception
of nature.
No; environment no more explains species than the laws of physics
explain those of chemistry, or than chemistry explains the evolutive principle,
of the vegetable, or the latter the evolutive principle of animals. The great
families of animals correspond to the eternal types of life; they may, indeed,
be called signatures of the Spirit and indicate varying degrees of
consciousness.
The appearance of mammalia after reptiles and birds cannot be explained
by a change of terrestrial environment, which is nothing but a condition of it.
It takes for granted a new embryogeny, and consequently a new intellectual and
animistic force acting within and at the base of nature, which we call the
“beyond” as regards sense perception. Were it not for this intellectual and
animistic force it would be impossible to explain even the appearance of an organized
cell in the inorganic world.
Finally Man, who sums up and crowns the series of beings, shows forth
all the divine thought in the harmony of his organs and the perfection of his
form, for he is a living model of the universal Soul, of active Intelligence.
Condensing all the laws of evolution and the whole of nature in his body, he
dominates and rises above it, in order to enter, freely and in full
consciousness, into the boundless kingdom of Spirit.
Experimental psychology, which is grounded on physiology, and has shown
a tendency, ever since the beginning of the nineteenth century, to become a
science again, has brought contemporary savants to the threshold of another
world, the world of the soul itself, wherein new laws have sway, without the
analogies ceasing to hold good. We bear mention of medical investigations and discoveries
of animal magnetism, somnambulism and all the different mental states of the
subconscious self from lucid sleep through double vision on to a condition of trance.
So far modem science has been merely feeling its way in this domain
where the science of the temples of old made straight for the goal because it
possessed the necessary principles and interpretations. Nor is it less true
that science has discovered in this region a whole series of facts which appear
astonishing, wonderful, and inexplicable, for they plainly contradict the
materialistic theories under whose sway it acquired the habit of thinking and
experimenting.
There is nothing more instructive than the indignant incredulity of
certain materialistic savants when brought face to face with all those
phenomena that aim at proving the existence of an invisible, a spiritual world.
At the present time, whoever presumes to prove the existence of the soul,
scandalizes the orthodoxy of atheism, just as that of the Church in former
times was scandalized by the denial of God.
True, it is no longer life, but reputation that is risked. At all
events, what is implied by the simplest phenomenon of mental suggestion at a
distance and by pure thought, a phenomenon continually being proved by the annals
of magnetism,(3) is a mode of action both of mind and will apart from physical
law or the visible universe. And so, the door of the invisible has been thrown
open. In the higher phenomena of somnambulism, this world opens out to its full
extent. But we will not go beyond what is vouched for by official science.
If we pass from the experimental and objective to the inner and subjective
psychology of our times, expressed in poetry, music and literature, we shall
find that a spirit of unconscious esoterism breathes through them. Never has
the aspiration after spiritual life, the invisible world, though rejected by
the materialistic theories of savants and by the opinion of society, been more
serious and real than it is now. This aspiration may be seen in the regrets and
doubts, the gloomy melancholy and even blasphemies of our realistic novelists and
decadent poets.
Never has the human soul had a deeper feeling of the inadequacy, the
wretchedness and unreality of its present life, never has it aspired more
ardently after the invisible “beyond,” though unable to believe in it. At times
its intuition even reaches the point of formulating transcendental truths which
have nothing whatever to do with the system acknowledged by its reason, which contradict
its superficial opinions and are involuntary flashes of its occult
consciousness. In proof of this we will quote a passage from a gifted thinker
who experienced all the bitterness and moral loneliness of this period:
« Every sphere of being, says Frédéric Amiel, tends towards a loftier
sphere, of which, even now, it has revelations and presentiments. The ideal, in
all its forms, is the anticipation, the prophetic vision of this existence,
higher than its own, to which each being is ever aspiring. This existence,
superior in dignity, is of a more interior, that is to say, more spiritual
nature. Just as volcanoes reveal to us the secrets of the interior of the
globe, so enthusiasm and ecstasy are fleeting explosions of this interior world
of the soul, and human life is nothing but the preparation for and the coming of
this spiritual life. Innumerable are the stages of initiation.
Watch, therefore, disciple of life, chrysalis of an angel, work out thy future
birth, for the divine Odyssey is naught but a series of metamorphoses, ever
more and more ethereal, in which each form, the result of those preceding, is
the condition of those that follow. Divine life is a series of successive
deaths, in which the spirit throws off its imperfections and symbols and yields
to the growing attraction of that ineffable centre of gravitation, the sun of
intelligence and love. »
For the most part, Amiel was nothing more than the combination of an
extremely intelligent Hegelian and a superior moralist. In penning these
inspired lines, however, he proved himself to be a profound theosophist, for
the very essence of esoteric truth could not possibly be expressed in more
striking or luminous fashion.
This rough outline is sufficient to demonstrate that the science and spirit
of modem times are, both unconsciously and without wishing it, preparing for
the reconstruction of ancient theosophy with more precise instruments and on a
more solid foundation. As Lamartine says, man is a weaver working on the
reverse side of the loom of time.
The day will come when, passing to the other side of the cloth, he will behold
the glorious and magnificent pattern he has, for centuries past, been weaving
with his own hands, without perceiving anything else than the tangled and
disordered threads of the reverse side. And when that day comes, he will hail Providence,
as manifested within himself. Then too, will be confirmed the words of a
Hermetic treatise belonging to our own times, words which will not seem too
bold to such as have penetrated deeply enough into occult traditions to catch a
faint glimmering of their wonderful unity:
« Esoteric doctrine is not merely a science, a philosophy, a morality and
a religion. It is the science, the philosophy, the morality and the religion of
which all the rest are nothing but preparations or degeneracies, partial or erroneous
expressions, according as they proceed to them or turn aside from them. » (4)
It would be idle to think that we had offered a complete demonstration
of this science of sciences. To effect this, nothing less would be needed than
to have all known and unknown sciences rebuilt according to their hierarchies,
and reorganized in the spirit of esoterism. All we expect to have proved is
that the doctrine of the mysteries is at the very source of our civilization;
that it has created the great religions both Aryan and Semitic; that
Christianity is bringing the whole human race to this doctrine, by means of its
esoteric reticence; that the general progress of modem science providentially
tends in this direction; and finally, that men must meet there as in one common
haven wherein they may find the synthesis of their separate elements.
This is a most critical period, and the extreme consequences of agnosticism
are beginning to show themselves in social disorganization. Science and
Religion, the twin guardians of Civilization, have both lost their supreme
gift, the magic of a mighty and powerful education. The temples of India and
Egypt have produced the greatest sages on earth. Heroes and poets have been
moulded in those of Greece. The apostles of Christ have been sublime martyrs
and have themselves produced martyrs in thousands.
The Church of the Middle Age, despite her elementary theology, created
saints and knights, because she had faith, and the spirit of Christ
overshadowed her from time to time. At the present day, neither the Church
imprisoned in dogma, nor Science bound up in matter, can any longer produce complete
human beings. The art of creating and forging souls is lost; it will only be
recovered when Science and Religion, united in one living force, together, and
of one accord, apply themselves to the welfare and the salvation of mankind. To
effect this, Science would not have to change its methods, but rather to extend
its sphere of action; Christianity need not change its traditions, but only
understand their origin, spirit and import.
This period of intellectual regeneration and social transformation will
come; of that we are convinced. Already there are sure signs indicative of its
approach. When Science has the knowledge, Religion will have the power, and Man
will act with renewed energy. The Art of life and each separate art can be regenerated
only through the mutual understanding of all three.
Meanwhile, what can be done in these times of gloom and darkness?
Faith, says a great teacher, is the courage of the mind which plunges ahead
and is confident of finding truth. This faith is not the enemy of reason, but
rather its torch; it is the faith of Christopher Columbus and of Galileo,
demanding proof and counter-proof, provando
e riprovando, the only faith possible at the present time.
For those who have irrevocably lost it, and these are many in number,
since the example is set by the upper classes, the path is smooth and easy to
follow. They have only to go with the stream, put up with their times instead
of struggling against them, become resigned to doubt or to an attitude of
negation, console themselves for human misery and approaching cataclysms by a
smile of disdain, and cloak the profound nothingness of things —in which alone
they believe— with a shining veil, to which the fair name of ideal is given, thinking
all the while that it is nothing else than a useful illusion.
As for the rest of us, poor lost mortals, who believe that the Ideal is the
only Reality, the only Truth in the midst of a changing and fleeting world, who
believe in the sanction and fulfillment of its promises, both in the history of
mankind and in the life to come, who know that this sanction is necessary, that
it is the reward of human brotherhood, the very raison d’être of the universe and the logic of God; for us who have
this conviction, there is only one thing we must resolve to do: affirm this
Truth as loudly and fearlessly as possible, throw ourselves along with it and
for its sake into the arena of action, and, rising above the confusion of the
fray, endeavour by meditation and individual initiation, to enter into the
Temple of immutable Ideas, there to arm ourselves with Principles that nothing
can shatter.
Notes
- See the fine works of François Lenormand and of M. Maspéro.
- Bell’s experiment. A ray of light is cast on a plate of selenium which sends it back on to another plate (some distance away) of the same metal. This latter communicates with a galvanic battery, to which a telephone is attached. The words uttered behind the first plate are distinctly heard through the telephone at the end of the second plate. The ray of light, accordingly, has served as a telephone wire. The sound waves have become transformed into light waves, the latter into galvanic wares, and these have become once again sound waves.
- See the fine book of M. Ochorowits on Mental Suggestion
- See The Perfect Way: or, the Finding of Christ, by Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, London, 1882.
(Occult Review, June 1911, p.335-345; this text is the introduction of Schuré's book "The Great Initiates")
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