Traditional Civilization
by AMS


The modern world’s idea of civilization is completely different from what civilization meant in traditional worlds.
In the traditional view, the idea of civilization was inextricably linked to the idea of the sacred, the idea of superhuman and supernatural divine order. In fact, the original and most rigorous meaning of the word “tradition” designates exactly the transferal, the handing over of the spiritual or intellectual doctrine (the doctrine concerning the unyielding and eternal truths) and, at the same time, the transferal of the “gift”, of the spiritual influences (“blessings”, “benedictions”), perpetuating the sacred in the world; we are talking here about pure spirituality or intellect, transcending the human being and any other individual order of existence. Let us just remember that, in the Christian doctrine, the Holy Tradition is the second way of securing, preserving and transferring the godly Revelation; it comprises the truths proclaimed by Christ and the Holy Apostles, whose words were put down in writing and preserved by the Church. This original meaning of “traditional” encompasses anything that includes a “superhuman” element (so of a purely intellectual or spiritual order); this is also the significance of the epithet “sacred”: all things linked to the transcendental order, characterized by absolute certainty, are sacred.
We dwelt upon the significance of this word because, in pre-modern civilizations, the idea of spiritual tradition of a superhuman origin is fundamental, in the sense that civilization has its starting point in this tradition; therefore, it is merely a reflection of the spiritual tradition in all the domains of human existence, be it individual or social. All known civilizations stem from a divine revelation, a disclosure through which divine order makes itself known to humans, through which primordial wisdom, of a non-human origin (as the Hindu doctrine puts it), manifests itself in our world.
Yet all the aforementioned aspects need plenty of clarification, since modern civilization, that we belong to, is based on exclusively human elements, by ignoring or denying any reality superior to human individuality, thus being the exact opposite of traditional civilization; hence the modern individual’s trouble in fathoming the traditional point of view.
In the traditional view, contingent things have no value in themselves, but as symbols of higher-order, steadfast truths (so meditation, intellectual vision, contemplation are needed); principles of a spiritual order (Platonic ideas, Aristotle’s archetypes) are mirrored on lower levels (the “sublunary” world of shapes, of becoming), hence the possibility of fathoming the unyielding reality starting from the contingent existence. Thus, any thing and any human activity are regarded as essentially stemming from principles; this means they always display a traditional, “sacred, “ritual” character, that in reality there is nothing which escapes spiritual influences, so there is no “profane” domain.
That is why, in a civilization of a traditional character, everything is based on the spiritual, “sacred” doctrine, namely on knowledge located on the level of meta-cosmic principles; thus, sciences pertaining to the domain of the relative, of contingent reality (as the corporeal world) are worthless in themselves, they merely make up an extension, an application of the “sacred science”, mirroring – in a certain contingent domain – the knowledge of principles; in this, their practice implies the possibility of elevation to the level of pure intellect; thus, on the one hand, the doctrine governs all levels of reality and, on the other hand, any individual – starting from the practice of his job or craft (according to his particular individual talent) – may acquire the pre-requisites for a higher knowledge, that of principles. In the Hindu tradition, the name assigned to traditional sciences – upveda – points to their subordination as compared to Veda, the ultimate sacred and traditional knowledge.
In the following lines, we shall dwell upon these aspects of the traditional doctrine (based especially on the data supplied by Hindu tradition), but not before shortly introducing two traditional “worlds”, one of them having a pre-modern origin and being contemporaneous to modern civilization.
Let us recall, therefore, what Christianity meant in the Middle Ages, when – up to the 14th century – the Church shaped the entire society, which was integrally linked to religion; consequently, all aspects of human existence, both individual and social, were structured following the criteria of the Christian spiritual tradition, while the direction of the human activity was in accordance with the revealed truths, with the superhuman truth; accepting, spreading the divine Word, evangelism presupposed and determined the reshaping of the world following a divine model, re-bridging the gap between the “human realm” and the “Heavens realm” (the supreme function, that of “Sovereign Pontiff”, Pontifex – the literal translation being “bridge-maker” – is the mediation function, of establishing communication between our world and the superior, superhuman, superindividual worlds). The medieval walks of life observed the traditional hierarchy, resembling the Hindu civilization; thus, the clergy was at the top of the hierarchy (the Brahmans’ caste in India), i.e. the organization preserving the sacred doctrine, an intellectual elite representing the spiritual authority; then came the nobility (the counterpart of the kshatriy), the third state (vaishy) and the serfs (shudri). The Christian empire was by no means a “lay” power, of a purely social, civilian nature (in the modern sense), but of a religious structure; the collocation Holy Roman Empire points exactly to its character.
In the same context, according to the Judaic tradition, everything that people do on this earth must be fulfilled in accordance with what goes on in the “heavenly realm”; all the ancient peoples that received a form of divine revelation, a form of the Logos, shared this view; that is why these peoples had, at the core of their civilization, the organization charged with safeguarding the sacred tradition, representing the spiritual authority; this core radiated throughout the entire society, since the individual in those ancient times deemed it essential to partake of tradition, to integrate his contingent existence in a superior, superhuman, universal order.
It is just as well impossible to fathom any aspect of the Islamic civilization if we ignore the godly Revelation included in the Koran and the traditional commentaries that stem either from the oral tradition which accompanies the Revelation ever since its origins, or from inspiration drawn from the same supernatural source (resembling, therefore, the Christian Holy Tradition, just like – in the Mischna Judaic tradition – the orthodox, traditional commentary accompanies the Tora, the sacred Book, ever since its origins). For a Muslim, his civilization is valuable in that it is of a superhuman origin; the Muslim thinks of himself as “civilized” because he lives by the divine Law, because he has the “sense” of the Absolute. The Koran, God’s Word, comprises both the sacred, metacosmic, divine doctrine, concerning the purely “fundamental” reality (i.e. at the level of the supreme Principle, God) and the legislation of the human world; in this way, the divine, the sacred spans the entire human existence, and this projection allows the human to partake of the divine through man’s and society’s spiritual and ritual conformity with the Koranic law.
Since we mentioned Christianity and Islam in order to illustrate the traditional point of view on civilization, a conclusion is obviously necessary: Christianity and Islam represent the spiritual, divine tradition (as forms of the Revelation) and, at the same time, human civilizations; in other words, they represent human civilizations based on the superhuman Tradition, “worlds” in harmony – as far as possible – with the universal order. Traditional civilization thus appears as a crossroads between the divine and the human and – for the civilized individual or people – it implies the “sense” of the sacred, of the absolute, which subordinates all purely human, contingent faculties and activities of man, thus organizing the individual, contingent existence.
In traditional thought and civilizations, the capacity to conceive the absolute is fundamental to man, it is his very essence, his “name”. According to all traditional doctrines, of all earthly creatures, man alone is made after God’s face and guise, as a “representative” of God on earth (imam in the Islamic tradition); this means he is distinct from any other being through transcendental intelligence, thus capable of conceiving the divine reality, of choosing this path though his free will and speech, essentially communicating with God through prayer and invocation.
In this context, let us just remember that, according to Christian anthropology, God – under his “personal”, creative appearance – conceived man as a being with a personal, hypostatic character, to represent Him within the Creation; this “primordial” man is the “spiritual man” (pneumatickos, “pneuma” = ghost, spirit, intelligence), a direct “aid” to the Ghost, a “natural” receptacle of the “divine science”. God made it so that he should assign a name to everything he came across, meaning that he was aware of each being’s essence and he could rule over the creation.
Man’s “core” is, therefore, purely spiritual, “after the Divine face”, and so is the core of our state of existence, the terrestrial Paradise (actually the same spiritual core, “mirror” of divinity, from a dual perspective, “microcosmic” and “macrocosmic”). Man’s “primordial, paradisiacal state” (mentioned in all traditions) is that state where the gravitational point of man’s conscience falls upon his intellectual, spiritual core, a unique, “supercosmic” point, which gives a perspective of eternity on all things, in the perfect simultaneity of the eternal present, i.e. given their unyielding cause, as everlasting essences, beyond any manifestation, as they “exist” in the divine omniscience (so knowing the “name” of the beings in Genesis). In all traditions, the primordial state is tantamount to possessing the “sense of eternity” (this being exactly the defining feature of contemplative orders within all traditional civilizations); having lost this intellectual intuition, his original spiritual core, man has entered the temporal sphere, peculiar to our state of existence, where the present is unnoticeable; on the contrary, by rising above the conditions of this transitory and contingent state, the present spans the entire reality (succession turns into simultaneity), and this “present” is purely spiritual.
Man’s purely spiritual core is symbolized in Judaism by luz, “the immortality nucleus”, the “immortality germ”, through which the human being will be restored; by regaining the purely intellectual core of his being, man regains the “primordial state”, the “sense of eternity”, thus attaining virtual immortality at the core of the human state. In the symbolism of the Hindu tradition, the “sense of eternity”, a contemplative faculty, is Shiva’s front eye, while the Islamic esoteric view mentions the “eye of the heart”.
The Islamic esoteric doctrine (suffism) points to the actual dimension of man’s “centrality” in our state of existence, of his earthly deiformity; it thus shows that angels, purely intellectual beings, belonging to the informal, superindividual creation (the upper states of existence) are limited, in their knowledge, to this or that of God’s attributes, which they manifest integrally in the formal creation (an angel is like a reflection of that attribute in creation) and they cannot contemplate all of God’s possibilities; instead, having created man “after His guise”, “central” in his natural state, even though this pertains to the formal or superindividual creation (the lower, “sublunary” states, subject to “generation and death”), God has bestowed upon man the possibility of rising to the contemplation of the divine unity, which comprises indistinctly the entirety of “names”, of divine attributes.
According to the traditional doctrine (metaphysical or esoteric), all peripheral kingdoms (mineral, vegetable, animal) make up the “form” that our corporeal world embraces, the superior, angelic states of being; everything that exists in our world has an angelic correspondent (let us recall the Platonic ideas, Aristotle’s archetypes and the Pythagorean numbers), everything is linked to an informal state (since the informal, superindividual creation is the cause, the principle in relation to the “world of shapes”).
According to the Christian doctrine, the energies created (the world of angels, hypostatic beings, with a ghostly body) are a direct manifestation of the increate energies (Saint Gregory Palama) and mediate between the increate energies (the divine ideas, intellects, attributes that are mirrored in creation as created energies) and the becoming of formal worlds (the individual human state included). Meister Eckhart (a representative of the Christian esoteric movement) states that: “The angel’s being depends upon the fact that the divine intellect is present within and through it He becomes acquainted with God…”.
Yet the “archetype”, “man’s angel” is God’s very “reflection” in creation (God seen as a creator, as a “person”), making up the “luminous core” of the total Creation, the “Angel of the Face”, Metatron (in the Hebrew Cabala), the cosmic Intelligence, the created Intellect, the universal Spirit. The various traditional doctrines converge perfectly on this principle.
The Hindu doctrine shows that Purusha (the divine Intellect, the Logos – in a different terminology) is mirrored directly in the cosmic substance (Prakriti – the passive, substantial pole of the creative Principle), so that its foremost production shall be the manifest divine Intelligence or the cosmic Intelligence (Buddhi) and the informal manifestation.
Similarly, the Islamic doctrine asserts that “the first thing God created was the Intellect” (The Prophet). Suffism (the esoteric side of Islam) distinguishes between the divine, increate Spirit or Intellect (Er-Ruh, the counterpart of the Hindu Purusha) and the universal, created Spirit, the first cosmic entity, manifesting the organizing principle of the world.
In the same context, Christian theology views the “Holy Ghost” not just as a metacosmic, divine, fundamental reality, but also as its reflection in the cosmic, created order; so it also contains the angelic, paradisiacal existence (playing Paraclete’s part in illuminating and blessing all men). In this, it is one and the same with the Archangel Michael (Mikael = he who is like God), leader of the “celestial troops”, the counterpart of Metatron.
The cosmic Intelligence (Buddhi, the universal, created Spirit), mirroring the increate, metacosmic spiritual Light, is embodied in the Judaic tradition (the doctrine of the Hebrew Cabala) by the angel Metatron (“The Angel of the Face”).
In the traditional view, the root of our intelligence is, therefore, “the cosmic Intelligence” (Metatron, Er-Ruh, Buddhi or Manu) which trades the “increate Intellect”, reflecting the pure, divine spiritual Light. According to Meister Eckhart, “There is within the soul something increate and uncreatable; this is the Intellect. If the entire soul were this way, it would be increate and uncreatable”; “The Intellect is to be found in the upper part of the soul, where it touches the nature of the angel and therefore it is a face of God…”; “The tiny spark of the intellect resembles these angels created by God, without any mediators, transcendental light, an image of the divine nature. The soul bears this nature within itself”.
According to the Hindu tradition, this principle – the manifest divine Intelligence, the “created Intellect” – resides at the core of all formal states of cosmic existence (in an indefinite multiplicity), mirroring the supreme Principle. In traditional symbolism, the levels of cosmic existence are pictured as spheres revolving around a fixed, steadfast axis, the “Axis Mundi”, the “Tree of Life”, which unites all states of manifestation, with various representations in all ancient traditions. It is pictured as a “Tree of light”, charged with spiritual influences, transgressing and “illuminating” all worlds; it is Agni or Sakti in Hinduism, the Burning Stake in the Old Testament (location and support of Divine manifestation), it is the manifestation of the Sehina (the Divine Presence) in the Cabala, it is the sacred Mountain in other traditions (as we have Căliman, Caelus Manus, “Mister Sky”). The terrestrial paradise, the “core” of our world, of a purely spiritual nature, is to be found on the “Axis Mundi”, so that – although it is actually part of the cosmos – it holds a virtually supercosmic position; it represents “the peak of the contingent being”, bhavagra in Hinduism (the already-mentioned “virtual immortality”). Spiritual influences descend the Axis (which holds the informal, angelic “worlds”) in geometric symbolism and they reach the core of the earthly world; from here they spread throughout it, following the four space directions (the four rivers that spring from Heaven, at the foot of the Tree of Life, in the symbolism of Genesis). Following the opposite direction, man has to update his intellectual core, according to the primordial, paradisiacal state; this is tantamount to going beyond the formal world (on a horizontal plane), followed by the “vertical” journey along the Axis, namely the conquest of the upper, informal, purely intellectual states of the universal existence.
In the Hindu tradition, the cosmic Intelligence – manifesting in relation to our world the structuring, regulating, divine Will – is Manu, the primordial Lawmaker that formulates our world’s Law (Dharma). The same principle, cosmic mode of the creative God, that of Monarch and Lawmaker of a community, sent Moses to Egypt, it gave him the Decalogue and the Law.
The link between man, as a “central” being in our world (therefore endowed with pure intelligence), and this principle, this “luminous core” of the total creation, the root of our intelligence, underlies the formation of spiritual cores. In this way, the celestial Pole, at the top of the spiritual hierarchy, has a “human” expression that legitimately represents him in the terrestrial world, thus forming the “terrestrial pole”; we are talking here about the organization, the initiatic hierarchy that safeguards the deposit of the sacred tradition, of a “non-human” origin, and encompasses both the spiritual authority and the temporal or “royal” power (the source of all legitimate authorities in our world).
In the Dacian tradition, we encounter this principle in the Zalmoxian (Saturnian) function; on top of Mount Omu, in the Bucegi, not far from the peak of Omu (popularly called “the Axle of the World”, “the Hub of the Earth”, designations in accordance with the spiritual Core) there is the rock that lends its name to this sacred Mountain (“Axis Mundi”), a replica of Zalmoxis, the Senior God, the Man, Saturnus Senex (Old Christmas, in the Romanian tradition); let us point out that, in the Dacian tradition, the supreme Principle is unnamed, un-coined (nirguna), beyond any distinction (resembling the Hindu Brahma).
In the Hindu tradition, members of the spiritual core accomplishing Manu’s function, in a way embodying Manu himself, were “beyond castes” (ativarna); the spiritual core made up the top of the hierarchy, the principle common to both the sacerdotal authority (represented by the Brahmanic caste) and the temporal, “royal” power, held by the kshatriy caste.
Actually, throughout Europe — up to the birth of the Christian civilization — leaders of various peoples, founders of various civilizations had this dual character – “sacerdotal” and “royal” -, they cumulated this double power. Let us recall that, in the Dacian civilization, priests and kings came from the same social class or caste; the historian Jordanes points out that this double power was being held by the sarabs (it’s a name we come across in the Walachian dynasty of the Basarabs); this fact attests the existence of a spiritual core at the basis of this civilization (acknowledged by the ancient world, when the Dacians were considered to be a hyperborean people, a word that designated the holders of the primordial tradition — Hyperborea, the Polar, far North realm, was the ancient name for the “spiritual Core of the world”, the terrestrial Paradise). Similarly, the Druids held both the spiritual authority and the reins of the society in the Celtic, Gaelic and Breton worlds. We remember, of course, that in the Roman imperial era Caesar had a dual character, sacerdotal and royal, he was Pontifex Maximus (the supreme Roman spiritual authority) and Imperator, just like the “legendary” Numa, the founder of Rome, the counterpart of the Hindu Manu (as well as the Greek Minos, the Egyptian Menes and the Celtic Menw).



Bibliography:

Frithjof Schuon - Despre unitatea transcendentă a religiilor (On the Transcendental Unity of Religions), Introducere în spiritualitatea lumii musulmane (Introduction to the Spirituality of the Muslim World)
Rene Guenon - Regele Lumii (King of the World), Simboluri ale Ştiinţei Sacre (Symbols of the Sacred Science), Criza lumii moderne (The crisis of the Modern World), Omul şi devenirea sa după Vedanta (Man and His Becoming After the Vedanta);
Vasile Lovinescu - Dacia Hiperboreeană (Hyperborean Dacia), O icoană creştină pe Columna Traiană (A Christian Icon on Trajan’s Column);
Florin Mihăescu - Cosmosul în tradiţia creştină (The Cosmos in the Christian Tradition).