Towards the Recovery of Wisdom

Extract

The most important task facing the West today is the recovery of that spiritual tradition which, by the fourteenth century, had found widespread expression and had its representatives throughout Catholic Europe, but which was then lost in the convulsions which shook the Latin Church in the sixteenth century, as attention was directed predominantly to questions of institutional authority, dogmatic orthodoxy and political advantage. Such, at least, is the view which in varying ways has recently been expressed by men of learning and perception whose viewpoint is that of non-European and non-Christian cultures, notably Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist. There have been suggestions of a similar kind from Christians who have opened their minds to the testimony of these other religions and cultures. Five recently published books which bear upon this subject are Edward Conze’s Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies, Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s The Encounter of Man and Nature, Frithjof Schuon’s In the Tracks of Buddhism, William Johnston’s The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing, and Sisirkumar Ghose’s Mystics and Society.

The malaise of modern Western society, whose symptoms are high rates of alcoholism and other forms of drug addiction, suicide, violence, the increase of mental illness, the steady but lethal pollution of the atmosphere and the earth’s waters, and the prodigal squandering of natural resources with little thought for the future, are seen by more than one of these writers as being connected with the fact that from about the end of the fifteenth century European religion became divorced from the perennial philosophy (with its spiritual understanding of nature) of which until then it had formed a branch.