Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution
and progress
by Frithjof Schuon
What is the evolutionist error?
Much could be said about the operations and modalities of Divine
Omnipotence. In the case of miracles, God projects something of Himself into the world and modifies the natural course of
things by His Presence. In other cases, which properly speaking do not fall
outside the natural course of things, the Divine Presence is less direct or, if
one prefers, more indirect, for the entry of God into the world cannot mean
that the Divine Presence enters the world with its very substance, which would
reduce the world to ashes. This amounts to saying that in the sphere of the
manifestations of Divine Power, one has to distinguish between "horizontal"
and "vertical" dimensions, the vertical being supernatural and the
horizontal natural; for the materialists, only the horizontal dimension
exists, and that is why they cannot conceive of causes which operate vertically
and which for that very reason are non-existent for them, like the vertical
dimension itself. (1) [Survey of Metaphysics and esoterism,
68-69].
(1) It may be pointed out here that the evolutionist error has
its roots in this prejudice. Instead of conceiving that creatures are
archetypes "incarnated" in matter, starting from the Divine Intellect
and passing through a subtle or animic plane, they
restrict all causality to the material world, deliberately ignoring
the flagrant contradictions implied by this conceptual "planimetry."
The "stopgap" theory of transformist
evolution
Man, like the Universe, is a fabric of determination and
indetermination; the latter stemming from the Infinite and the former from the
Absolute.
It may be objected that our preceding considerations on the human
phenomenon are not an exposition of anthropology properly so called, since we
offer no information on the "natural history" of man nor a fortiori on his biological origin, and so on.
Now such is not our intention; we do not wish to deal with factors that escape
our experience, and we are very far from accepting the "stopgap"
theory of transformist evolutionism. Original man
was not a simian being barely capable of speaking and standing upright; he was
a quasi-immaterial being enclosed in an aura still celestial, but deposited on
earth; an aura similar to the "chariot of fire" of Elijah or the
"cloud" that enveloped Christ's ascension. That is to say, our
conception of the origin of mankind is based on the doctrine of the projection
of the archetypes ab intra; thus our position
is that of classical emanationism - in the Neoplatonic or gnostic sense of
the term - which avoids the pitfall of anthropomorphism while agreeing with the
theological conception of creatio ex nihilo. Evolutionism is the very negation of the
archetypes and consequently of the divine Intellect; it is therefore the
negation of an entire dimension of the real, namely that of form, of the
static, of the immutable; concretely speaking, it is as if one wished to make a
fabric of the wefts only, omitting the warps.
Quite obviously, an anthropology is not
complete if it does not take into account the spiritual dimension of man and
therefore factors such as the eschatological hierarchy which we have just
spoken, or of the analogous social functions. To say homo
sapiens, is to say Homo religiosus; there is no
man without God. [To have a center, Survey of Integral
Anthropology, p. 50-51].
How should we represent creation or creations? as a process of transformism
taking place in "matter"?
Creation - or "creations" - should then be represented not as
a process of transformism taking place in
"matter" in the naively empirical sense of the word, but rather as an
elaboration by the life-principle, that is to say, something rather like the
more or less discontinuous productions of the imagination: images arise in the
soul from a non-formal substance with no apparent link between them; it is not
the images which transform themselves, it is the animic
substance which causes their arising and creates them. That man should appear
to be the logical issue, not indeed of an evolution, but of a series of
"sketches" more and more centered on the human form - sketches of
which the apes seem to represent disparate vestiges - this fact, or this
hypothesis, in no way signifies that there is any common measure, thus a kind
of psychological continuity, between man and the anthropomorphic and in some
sense "embryonic" bodies which may have preceded him. The
coming of man is a sudden "descent" of the Spirit into a receptacle
that is perfect and definitive because it conforms to the manifestation of the
Absolute; the absoluteness of man is like that of the geometrical point, which,
strictly speaking, is quantitatively unattainable starting from the
circumference. (1) [Stations of Wisdom, p.89].
(1) The same thing is repeated in the womb: as soon as the body is
formed the immortal soul is suddenly fixed in it like a flash of lightning, so
that there is complete discontinuity between this new being and the embryonic
phases which have prepared its coming. It has quite rightly been maintained,
against transformism, not only that "the
greater cannot come from the less" (Guénon),
but also that even though something existent may gain more precision or become
atrophied, there cannot on the other hand be a motive, in a species, for the
adjunction of a new element, not to mention that nothing could guarantee the
hereditary character of such an element (according to Schubert-Soldern).
Naivety of transformist
evolutionism
Transformist
evolutionism offers a patent example of "horizontality" in the
domain of the natural sciences, owing to the fact that it puts a biological
evolution of "ascending" degrees in place of a cosmogonic
emanation of "descending" degrees. (1) Similarly, modern philosophers
- mutatis mutandis - replace metaphhysical causality with
"physical" and empirical causalities, which no doubt demands
intelligence, but one that is purely cerebral. [Roots of the Human
Condition, p. 5].
(1) We understand the term "emanation" in the Platonic sense:
the starting point remains transcendent, hence unaffected, whereas in deist or
naturalist emanationism the cause pertains to the
same ontological order as the effect.
Mechanism and empirical appearance
There are two points to consider in created things, namely the empirical
appearance and the mechanism; now the appearance manifests the
divine intention, as we have stated above; the mechanism merely operates the
mode of manifestation. For example, in man's body the divine intention is
expressed by its form, its deiformity, (1) its
symbolism and its beauty; the mechanism is its anatomy and vital functioning.
The modern mentality, having always a scientific and "iconoclastic"
tendency, tends to overaccentuate the mechanism to
the detriment of the creative intention, and does so on
all levels, psychological as well as physical; the result is a jaded and
"demystified" mentality that is no longer "impressed" by
anything.
By forgetting the divine intention - which nonetheless is apparent a
priori - one ends in an emptiness devoid of all
reference points and meaning, and in a mentality of nihilism and despair, if
not of careless and brutal materialism. In the face of this deviation it
is the child who is right when he believes that the blue sky above us is
That there are sciences, including physical sciences, is in man's nature
because it is in the nature of things; but it is quite as much in the nature of
things that man is unable to unveil Isis and that he must not try to do so.
Human science has limits of principle; what in traditional civilizations
prevents man from overstepping these limits is his relationship with God, with
all the consequences that this relationship implies.(2)
(1) We should specify: total or integral deiformity,
for in animals too there is - or can be - a deiformity,
but it is partial; similarly for plants, minerals, elements and other orders of
phenomena.
(2) Although a believer, Pasteur is supposed to have said that when
entering his laboratory he left God outside; be that as it may, this plainly
shows the false realism of scientists, while at the same time - in a
quite different respect - it demonstrates the inferiority complex of those who
are still believers towards the apparently victorious rationalists.
Science's planimetric view
of objects
One point that certain physicists do not seem to understand is that the
mechanism of the world can be neither purely deterministic nor a fortiori
purely arbitrary. In reality, the universe is a veil woven of necessity and
freedom, of mathematical rigor and musical play; every phenomenon
participates in these two principles, which amounts to saying that everything
is situated in two apparently divergent but at bottom concordant dimensions,
exactly as the dimensions of space are concordant while giving rise to
divergent appearances that are irreconcilable from the standpoint of a planimetric view of objects.(3)
(3) Let us take the example of the human body: its principial
form, which cannot be other than what it is, stems from the Absolute and from
necessity, whereas its actual form - a particular body, and not the body as
such which gives rise to innumerable variations, stems from the Infinite and
from freedom. Its principial form is as it were
mathematical, it is measurable; on the contrary, its actual form is as it were
musical, its beauty is unfathomable. Anatomy has its limits, beauty does not;
but beauty can be relative, whereas anatomy cannot.
"Horizontal" and "vertical" causes
Another point that moderns do not grasp, is that there is no reason for
necessarily seeking the cause of a phenomenon on the plane where it is
produced, and that on the contrary one has to consider the possibility of a
non-material cause, above all when it is a question of a phenomenon whose
beginning is unknown a priori, and unknowable materially, as is the
origin of living beings. Transformist
evolutionism is the classical example of the bias that invents
"horizontal" causes because one does not wish to admit a
"vertical" dimension: one seeks to extort from the physical plane
a cause that it cannot furnish and that is necessarily situated above matter.
Even within the order of physical causes, one has to take into account
the simultaneous presence of the immanent metaphysical Cause: if a seed is the
immediate cause of a plant, it is because the divine archetype intervenes in
the physical causality. Geometrically speaking, causes can be situated on the
"concentric circles" that constitute the Universe, but other causes -
and with all the more reason the First Cause - are situated at the Center and
act through the radii emanating from it. The divine Intellect contains the
archetypes of creation, and it is starting from this Cause - or from this
causal system - at a given cyclic "moment" of the cosmogonic
process, that the "ideas" are "incarnated" which will be
manifested in the form of contingent creatures.
We do not ask physicists to be content with an anthropomorphic and naive
creationism; but at least it would be logical on their part - since they aim at
a total and flawless science - to try to understand the traditional ontocosmological doctrines, especially the Hindu doctrine
of the "envelopes (kosha) of the Self (Atma) a doctrine that, precisely, presents the
Universe as a system of circles proceeding from the Center-Principle to that
extreme limit which for us is matter. For human science does not derive solely
from the need to know and to register; more profoundly its origin is the thirst
for the essential; now the sense of essentiality attracts us toward shores other
than those of the limited plane of physical phenomena alone. [Roots of the
Human Condition, p. 16-20].
Who proved the evolutionary theory and when has it
been proven?
We shall no doubt be told that the reality of a creator God has not been
demonstrated; however, aside from the fact it is not difficult to demonstrate
this reality with arguments proportionate to its nature - but which for that
very reason are inaccessible to certain minds - the least that can be said is
that evolution has never been proved by anybody whatsoever, and with
good reason; transformist evolution is accepted as a
useful and provisional postulate, as one will accept no matter what, provided
no obligation is felt to accept the primacy of the Immaterial since the latter
escapes the control of our senses.
And yet, starting from the recognition of the immediately tangible
mystery that is subjectivity or intelligence, it is easy to understand that the
origin of the Universe is, not inert and unconscious matter, but a spiritual Substance
which, from coagulation to coagulation and from segmentation to segmentation -
and other projections both manifesting and limiting - finally produces matter
by causing it to emerge from a more subtle substance, but one which is already
remote from principial Substance.
It will be objected that there is no proof of this, to which we reply -
aside from the phenomenon of subjectivity which precisely comprises this proof,
leaving aside other possible intellectual proofs, not needed by Intellection - to
which we reply then, that there are infinitely fewer proofs for this
inconceivable absurdity, evolutionism, which has the miracle of consciousness
springing from a heap of earth or pebbles, metaphorically speaking. [From
the Divine to the Human, p. 5-6].
What would be the meaning of life if evolutionists
were right?
In the beginning was the Spirit: hence the Word; for the Spirit, wanting
and having to communicate itself because It is the Sovereign Good, brings about
the manifestation of Its innumerable possibilities. The Spirit is both Light
and Heat; the latter, life, is as miraculous as the former, intelligence, when
we consider them on the plan of their earthly manifestation. Besides, to reduce
all intelligence and all love to material causes is a way of not wanting to
admit that our material existence is an exile; of wanting, on the contrary, to
feel at ease in a world that presents itself as an end in itself, and which
exempts man from the effort of transcending things and of transcending himself;
whereas without this effort man bypasses the human vocation.
If the evolutionists are right, the human
phenomenon is inexplicable and human life is not worth living. Moreover it is
to theses conclusions that they arrive in the end, whence their axiom of the
absurdity of existence; this is to say that they attribute to the object, which
is inaccessible to them, the absurdity of the subject, which they have
deliberately chosen by following the propensity towards not innocent, but
human, animality. [From the Divine to the Human,
p. 17].
About the metaphysically and physically aberrant
imaginations of the evolutionists
The human form cannot be transcended, its sufficient reason being
precisely to express the Absolute, hence the untranscendable;
and this cuts short the metaphysically and physically aberrant imaginations
of the evolutionists, according to whom this form would be the result of a
prolonged elaboration starting from animal forms; an elaboration which is at
once arbitrary and unlimited.
Materialists, even those who consider transformist
evolution inexplicable and even contradictory, accept this hypothesis as an
indispensable idea, which moreover carries us outside of science and into
philosophy, or more exactly into rationalism with its reasonings
cut off from the very roots of knowledge; and if the evolutionist idea is
indispensable to them, it is because in their minds it replaces the concept of
a sudden creation ex nihilo, which to them
seems the only other possible solution.
In reality, the evolutionist hypothesis is unnecessary because the
creationist concept is so as well; for the creature appears on earth, not
by falling from heaven, but by progressively passing - starting from the
archetype - from the subtle to the material world, materialization being
brought about within a kind of visible aura quite comparable to the
"spheres of light" which, according to many accounts, introduce and
terminate celestial apparitions. [From the Divine to the Human, p. 88]
Is the ape there to show what man has been?
The ape, for example, is there to show what man is and what he is
not, and certainly not to show what he has been; far from being able to
be a virtual form of man, the ape incarnates an animal desire to be human, hence
a desire of imitation and usurpation; but he finds itself as if before a closed
door and falls back all the more heavily into its animality,
the perfect innocence of which, it can no longer recapture, if one may make use
of such a metaphor; it is as if the animal, prior to the creation of man and to
protest against it, had wished to anticipate it, which evokes the refusal of
Lucifer to prostrate before Adam. [From the Divine to the Human, p. 98]
Contradictions of the notion of evolution and progress
If man is a hypocrite, two options lie before us: either he is basically
such, and then it would be impossible to remark the fact without going outside
human nature by miraculous or Divine means; or else man is only accidentally
and relatively hypocritical, in which case there was no need to wait for
psychoanalysis to take account of the fact, since health is more fundamental to
the nature of man than illness, and there have therefore always been men who
could recognize evil and who knew the cure for it.
Or again, if man is profoundly sick, one cannot see why psychoanalysis
should alone have been able to notice the fact and why its explanation, which
is quite arbitrary and in fact essentially perverse, should alone be the right
one.
One can obviously try to get round this by putting it down to the
working of "evolution," but in that case one has to blind oneself
both to the qualities of our ancestors and the vices of our contemporaries, to
say nothing of the impossibility of demonstrating - or the absurdity of admitting
- the possibility of a sudden burst of inttellectual and moral objectivity in a
process that is merely biological and quantitative.
For if a natural development were to lead up to a reflexive
intelligence, to a sudden act of awareness that perceived the development for
what it was, that outcome would be a reality falling entirely outside the realm
of the evolutionary process; there would thus be no common measure between the
act of awareness and the quite contingent movement that preceded it, and this
movement, therefore, under no circumstances, could be the cause of the
awareness in question.
This argument is the very negation of the theory of transformist
evolution, and therefore of all such notions as those of man as
a "link" or man as a product of chance; by the same token it also
excludes any mystique of a generative matter, of a biosphere or noosphere or of a "point omega."' Man is what he
is, or he is nothing; the capacity for objectivity and absoluteness inherent in
thought proves the quasi-absolute or fixed and irreplaceable character of the
thinking creature; this is what is meant by the Scriptural words "made in
God's image." [Logic and Transcendence, p.12-13].
The evolutionary theory, a substitute for the
traditional theory of emanation
In reality, the evolutionary theory,..., is a substitute for the
traditional theory of emanation and consists in denying the
periphery-center relationship.(1) Thus the very existence of the Center, source
of emanation, and of the radii leading to it is denied, and an attempt is made
to situate every hierarchical relationship on the curve marking the periphery.
Instead of proceeding upward, starting from the corporeal level and
passing through the animic sphere, then mounting
toward realities at first supraformal and finally principial or metacosmic, an
evolving hierarchy is imagined, advancing from matter, through vegetable and
animal life, to human consciousness, itself considered as some kind of
transitory accident.
With a thoughtlessness that is infinitely culpable when they call
themselves believers some people imagine a superman who is destined to take
man's place, and who consequently would also render Christ's humanity
contemptible (2); and a certain "genius" imagines at the end of the
evolutionist and progressivist chain something he is
not ashamed to call "God" and which is no more than a pseudoabsolute decked out in a pseudotranscendence;
for the Eternal will always be Alpha and has always been Omega.
Creatures are crystallized in the corporeal zone emanating, in a manner at
once, continuous and discontinuous, from the Center and from on high; they do
not "evolve" by coming from matter and so from the periphery and from
below. But at the same time, and beyond reach of our human point of view,
creatures are all "contained" in God and do not really come out from
Him; the whole play of relationships between God and the world is but a
monologue of relativity. [Logic and Transcendence, p.68-69].
(1) This must not, of course, be confused with the emanationist
heresy, which has nothing metaphysical about it and which reduces the Principle
to the level of manifestation, or Substance to the level of accidents.
(2) For God only manifests himself directly in a support which by
definition marks the presence of the Absolute in relativity and is for this
reason "relatively absolute." This "relative absoluteness"
is the justification of the possibility Homo Sapiens Man might
disappear, if God so wished, but he could not change into another species; the
Platonic ideas are precise possibilities and not just misty vagueness: every
possibility is what it is and what it ought to be.
About the evolutionist prejudice
Evolutionism, ..., provides a typical example of reasoning in the
absence of sufficient premises. Modern scientism starts
from the gratuitous and crude axiom that there is no reality outside
sensorial, or virtually sensorial experience with the highly relative exception
of psychology, a very limited domain which, in any case, can be reduced
philosophically to a subtle mode of the sensorial; and since it starts from
this axiom, it will reason in accordance therewith, leaving out of account
premises that surpass it.
Now in the case of a reality that does surpass the sensorial and
empirical order, any such reasoning must evidently be false - as well might one
reason about a sparrow while denying the existence of birds - and it will
demonstrate its falsity by replacing the missing premises by purely functional
hypotheses; and these hypotheses will betray their chimerical nature by
their monstrousness, as witness the concepts of the ape-man or of "hominization". All this is truly sinister
if one considers that the essential truth has reference, on the one hand, to
the transcendent Absolute and, on the other, to the suprasensible
cosmos, or to the extrasensorial character of the
greater part of the cosmos, including our souls which, precisely, appertain to
this order. [Logic and Transcendence, p.93-94].
Importance of matter for evolutionists
At first sight, it might be thought that the end result of the cosmogonic projection is matter, which in fact appears as
the "final point" of the existentiating
trajectory; but it is so only in a certain respect, that of the cosmic
Substance, of which it is the most exteriorized and contingent mode; it is such
at least for our sensorial world, for one can conceive of indefinitely more
"solidified" substances than the matter pertaining to our spatial
cosmos (1).
(1) For the evolutionists, this matter is the very theater - or the
initial substance - of universal Possibility; gratuitous concepts such as those
of the biosphere or of the "noosphere" add
nothing that could attenuate this error whose effects are incalculable.
In which case evolutionism would evolutionism be
justified?
Since we alluded above to the evolutionist prejudice, it will be
permissible here to say a few more words on the subject: evolutionism would
be justified if a tree could produce something other and better than what is
contained in its seed; it would be justified if the fruits of the tree
were, not the manifestation of what the seed already contains, but the result
of an evolution that is unforeseeable and variable according to circumstances,
or if it were a matter of chance whether an apple tree bears apples and not
figs.
The phenomena of evolution and transmutation exist within the limits of
certain contingencies, otherwise the seed would never
become a tree and a plant would never modify its shape under given conditions,
such as a change of soil or climate; but these two factors - evolution and
transmutation - are altogether secondary in relation to the principle of
qualitative anticipation of effects within their own cause. These truths assume
a particular importance when it is a question of Revelations and traditions,
for the slightest error on this plane can be devastating to the soul and to the
intelligence. [Treasures of Buddhism, p27].
In any case people today far too readily include under the common denomination
of want or misery both an ancestral simplicity of life and mere lack of food,
and the continual confusing of these two things is far from unbiased; the
catchword "under-developed countries" is from this point of
view highly significant in its blatant perfidy. A scientific machine-age
standard of living has been invented and the aim is to impose this on all
peoples (1), above all on those who are classed as 'backward' whether they be
Hindus or Hottentots. For these believers in progress happiness means a host
of noisy and ponderous complications calculated to crush out many elements of
beauty and so also of well-being; when they want to abolish such and such
'fanaticisms' and 'horrors' these people forget that there are also atrocities
on the spiritual plane and that the so-called humanitarian civilization of the
moderns is saturated with them.
Notes
(1) The Sankaracarya of Kañci
has pointed out ... that 'the very idea of raising the standard of living
... will have the most injurious effects on society. Raising the standards
of living means tempting people to encumber themselves with more luxuries and
thus leading them ultimately to real poverty in spite of increased production. Aparigraha meant that every man should take from
nature only so much as is required for his life in this world.'
In order to be able to judge of the quality of happiness in some past
state of the world one would have to be able to put oneself in the place of the
men who lived in it and adopt their way of evaluating things and so also their
imaginative and sentimental reflexes; many things to which we have become
accustomed would seem to them intolerable restraints to which they would prefer
the more familiar risks; just the ugliness and the atmosphere of triviality
of the world of today would seem to them like the worst of nightmares.
History as such cannot give a full account of the soul of some distant
epoch: it chiefly registers calamities, leaving aside all the static factors of
happiness; it has been said that happiness has no history, and this is
profoundly true. Wars and epidemics no more reflect than do certain customs
the happy aspects of the lives of our ancestors, while their literary and
artistic works plainly do so. Even if one supposes that history could tell one
nothing about the happiness of the Middle Ages, the cathedrals and other
artistic manifestations of the mediaeval world provide an indisputable witness
to that happiness in the sense that (to put it at its lowest) they do not give
the impression of a humanity more unhappy than that of today; like the
Orientals of old the ancestors of the present Europeans would no doubt have
preferred, given the choice, to be unhappy after their own fashion than happy
after ours.
There is nothing human which is not an evil from some point of view: even
tradition itself is in certain respects an 'evil', since it must handle
evil things in man and these human ills invade it in their turn, but it is then
a lesser evil and, humanly speaking, it would obviously be far truer to call it
a 'good'. The pure truth is that 'God alone is good' and that every
earthly thing has some ambiguous side to it.
No doubt some will say that humanitarianism, far from being
materialistic by definition, aims at reforming human nature by education and legislation;
now it is contradictory to want to reform the human outside the divine
since the latter is the essence of the former; to make the attempt is in the
end to bring about miseries far worse than those from which one was trying to
escape.
Philosophical humanitarianism underestimates the immortal soul just
because it overestimates the human animal; it compels people even to denigrate
saints that they may the better be able to whitewash criminals; the one seems
unable to go without the other. From this results oppression of those of
contemplative bent from their most tender years: in the name of egalitarianism vocations
are blurred and geniuses are worn down, by schools in particular and by
official worldliness in general; every spiritual element is banished from
professional and public life (2) and this amounts to removing from life a great
part of its content and condemning religion to a slow death.
The modern levelling - which may call itself
'democratic'- is the very opposite of the theocratic equality of the
monotheistic religions, for it is founded, not on the theomorphisrn
of man, but on his animality and his rebellion.
Besides, the thesis of indefinite progress comes up against the
following contradiction: if man has been able to exist for thousands of years
while under the domination of errors and stupidities - always supposing that
the traditions are merely such, in which case the error and stupidity would be
well-nigh measureless - the immensity of this deception would be incompatible
with the intelligence with which man as such is credited and with which he must
be credited.
In other words, if man is intelligent enough to arrive at the 'progress'
which our period embodies - assuming there is any reality in such progress -
then man must have been a priori too intelligent to remain for thousands
of years the dupe of errors as ridiculous as those which modern progressivism
attributes to him; and if he is on the contrary stupid enough to have believed
in them so long, then he must also be too stupid to escape from them.
Again, if present-day man had at long last arrived at truth, he would
have to be proportionately superior to the men of former times, and the
disproportion between the two would be well-nigh absolute. Now the least that
can be said is that the men of ancient or mediaeval times were neither less
intelligent nor less virtuous than modern man. The ideology of progress is one
of those absurdities that are as remarkable for the lack of imagination as for
the total lack of sense of proportion they display; this is, moreover,
essentially a vaishya illusion, rather like
that of 'culture', which is nothing more than intellectuality stripped of
intelligence. [Castes and Races, p.28-30].
(2) On the other hand, by a kind of compensation, professional life
more and more assumes a "religious" air in the sense that it
claims the whole of man, his soul as well as his time, as though the
sufficient reason for the human condition were some economic enterprise and not
immortality.