Ideas and Society

Our age is enamored of the new. There is almost an instinctual assumption among most of us that whatever is new is better. This presupposition, however, is of relatively recent origin. The idea of technological, social, and moral “progress”-that human society is steadily advancing from primitive antiquity to the modern golden age-originated only in the nineteenth century. Its origins can be linked in part to the fact that technological change is now progressing exponentially, so that a person born before radio, automobiles, and airplanes can die in an age of personal computers, atomic weapons, and space flight. Before the nineteenth century most people would have lived their lives in precisely the same way their grandparents and great-grandparents had. They might witness a technological innovation once in their life, but even that would not be dramatic enough to completely transform they way they lived. Today each and every one of us, in a single lifetime, will see the entire social and technological order utterly transformed not once, but several times.

Before the rise of the modern Cult of Progress, the standard assumption among almost all cultures was that God, in the primordial past, had established a pure, pristine set of beliefs and practices, which had slowly degenerated over the centuries. The Golden Age of Mankind was not to be found in a future to be born in technological revolution, but in a dim, nearly forgotten past. This theory of devolution is reflected in the “Four Ages” or “Four Kingdoms” myth found throughout the world. In Greek mythology, the Four Ages are associated with the metals Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron. The “Four Kingdoms” were a broadly parallel sequence of four world empires, generally associated in the West with some combination of Assyria, Babylon, Media, Persia, Greece, or Rome. Variations on this theme can be found among the Persians in the Bahman Yasht, in Hesiod among the Greeks, in the Fourth Sibylline Oracle, and among the Jews (Daniel 2:31-45). The Hindus also speak of Four Ages (yuga); we are living in the fourth and worst, the kaliyuga. The Aztec “Myth of the Sun” speaks of a similar sequence of five ages. Generally, these myths maintain that the first age was the best, and the fourth, contemporary, age is the worst in human history. In most of these schemas, there will also be a fifth age, a promised future return to the primordial Golden Age. (See J. Smith, “Ages of the World” in M. Eliade, ed., Encyclopedia of Religions, 1:128-33) (Note that Moderns have essentially reversed this myth, with the description of human history as evolving from the Stone Age through the Bronze and Iron Ages, to our modern Golden Age.)

Much of the history of religion is intertwined with the search by great sages and prophets to rediscover and return to the primordial religion of the Golden Age. However revolutionary his ideas might have been in actual practice, for instance, Confucius always claimed that he was simply reiterating the “Way of Heaven” which the ancient kings of China had understood and followed, but which rulers of his age ignored. Muhammad did not claim to create a new religion, but to restore authentic Islam-“submission” to God-the pristine religion of Abraham. In the Bhagavad-Gita (4.1-3, 7), Krishna, an incarnation of the god Vishnu, teaches his disciple Arjuna the Hindu view of the primordial revelation:

I [Krishna] revealed this eternal
Discipline [yoga] to Vivasvat [the sun god, father of Manu];
Vivasvat told it to Manu [the first man, the Hindu Adam]
Manu imparted it to Ikshvaku [son of Manu, ancestor of the Hindu royal lineage].

Thus, having received this [discipline] in succession
The royal seers [rishis] knew it;
But after a great time here [on earth]
This discipline was lost-O [Arjuna].

It is this primordial discipline [yoga]
Which I reveal to you today,
Since you are my devoted comrade.
This is indeed the supreme esoteric mystery. .

Whenever the righteous cosmic order [dharma]
Decreases-O [Arjuna]-
And wicked chaos arises,
Then I come forth [to restore the primordial teaching].

The search for the primordial religion was also widespread in the West. The Protestant Reformers did not aim at creating a new religion, but believed they were returning Christianity to its original form. Today, following orthodox secular interpretations, most people understand the European Renaissance as an age of the development of new ideas. But this view fundamentally distorts the self-understanding of the Renaissance. The term itself means “rebirth,” referring to the belief of Renaissance thinkers that they were rediscovering the lost knowledge of the ancients. This rediscovery of primordial knowledge was not simply Greek and Roman classical thought. Rather, it included a search for the original Greek and Hebrew versions of the Bible (in place of the Vulgate, the standard Latin translation of the day). And not just the Bible. Jewish Kabbalah was studied by scholars such as Ficino because it was thought to contain a primordial revelation to Adam or Enoch. When given the choice between translating Plato or the esoteric Hermetica of the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, the scholars of Florence decided to translate the Hermetica first because it was thought to contain primordial knowledge that antedated the relative latecomer Plato. Many scholars in the West sought the Prisca Theologia, the ancient theology revealed by God to the great prophets, sages and philosophers outside the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Paradoxically, what many seekers believed to be a rediscovery of that “Old Time Religion” often in fact turned out to be a misunderstanding of ancient ideas reclothed in contemporary garb and read through contemporary assumptions and categories of thought. This was certainly the case for the scholars of the Renaissance. What was believed to be a restoration of the true primordial revelation turns out, in fact, to be something completely new.

While no one today can deny the astonishing scientific accomplishments of the modern world, many question whether these technological achievements are accompanied by parallel development in moral and religious thought. While new technology allows us to do more, it gives us no guidance as to what we should do with our marvelous new potential. Some believe that the modern world has lost contact with the “sacred center” and has been set adrift, rudderless in an endless sea of relativism. William Butler Yeats’ famous lines reflect this angst:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction; while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

In the twentieth century, an influential intellectual-religious movement that rejected modernity is known as the “Traditionalist school,” led by European scholar-mystics such as Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon. Viewing the modern world as one of moral and intellectual degeneration, they sought to discover the primordial “transcendental unity of all religions” through the scholarship of comparative religion. (On this movement, see Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern Word: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, forthcoming, early 2004.) Others, confusing exotic with ancient, seek primordial wisdom by searching out the esoteric teachings of the East; paradoxically, many Asians are simultaneously seeking the ancient exotic wisdom of the West-Christianity. It is clear that, for many, the lure of the primordial religion continues today, based on a sense that, despite its technological grandeur, something precious has been lost in the modern world-a pearl of great price that is worth selling all to obtain.

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