The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

11 Unity and ‘Simplicity’

We have seen that a desire for simplification can become illegitimate or pernicious and that it has become a distinctive feature of the modern mentality; this desire is so strong that certain philosophers have given way to it in the scientific domain, and have gone to the length of presenting it as a sort of logical ‘pseudo-principle’, in the form of a statement that ‘nature always takes the simplest course’. This is a perfectly gratuitous postulate, for there does not seem to be any reason why nature should work in that way and not in any other; many conditions other than simplicity can enter into its workings, and can outweigh simplicity to such an extent that nature seems, at least from our point of view, often to take a course that is extremely complicated. Indeed, this particular ‘pseudo-principle’ amounts to no more than a wish arising from a sort of ‘mental laziness’: it is desired that things should be as simple as possible, because if they really were so they would be so much the easier to understand; and all this is quite in accordance with the very modern and profane conception of a science that must be ‘within the reach of all’, but that is obviously only possible if it is so simple as to be positively ‘infantile’, and if all considerations of a superior or really profound order are rigorously excluded from it.

Even shortly before the beginning of modern times properly so called there can be found something like an early indication of this state of mind in the scholastic adage: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.[38] All is well if the application of this adage is limited to purely hypothetical speculations, but then it becomes of no interest whatever, except within the domain of pure mathematics, for there at least it is legitimate for anyone to confine himself to working on mental constructions without having to relate them to anything else; he can ‘simplify’ then as much as he likes, just because he is concerned only with quantity, for insofar as quantity is considered in itself and by itself, its combinations are not comprised in the effective order of manifestation. On the other hand, as soon as matters of fact need to be taken into account, it is quite another affair, and it becomes impossible not to recognize that ‘nature’ herself seems to go out of her way to multiply beings praeter necessitatem; what kind of logical satisfaction can anyone experience in contemplating, for instance, the multitude and the prodigious variety of the kinds of animals and plants that live around him? Surely this is a long way from the simplicity postulated by those philosophers who want to twist reality to suit the convenience of their own understanding and the understanding of the ‘average’ of their like; and if such is the case in the corporeal world, in itself a very limited domain of existence, how much more must it be the case in the other worlds; must it not indeed then be indefinitely much more so?[39] In order to cut short the discussion of this subject, it is only necessary to recall that, as has been explained elsewhere, everything that is possible is for that reason real in its own order and according to its own mode, and that since universal possibility is necessarily infinite everything that is other than a sheer impossibility has its place therein: what else, then, but this same desire for a misconceived simplification drives philosophers, when evolving their ‘systems’, always to try to set a limit to universal possibility in one way or another?[40]

It is a particularly strange fact that the tendency to simplicity understood in this sense, together with the tendency to uniformity, which in a sense runs parallel to it, is taken by people whom it affects as a striving for ‘unification’; but it is really ‘unification’ upside down, like everything else that is directed toward the domain of pure quantity, or toward the lower and substantial pole of existence; it is thus another example of that sort of caricature of unity that has already been considered from other points of view. If true unity is also to be described as ‘simple’, that word must be understood in quite a different sense, so that it conveys only the essential indivisibility of true unity, and so as to exclude the idea that unity is in any way ‘composite’, and this implies that it cannot rightly be conceived as made up of parts of any kind. A sort of parody of the indivisibility of unity may be found in the indivisibility that some philosophers and physicists attribute to their ‘atoms’, but they fail to see that it is not compatible with the nature of the corporeal, for a body is by definition extended, and extension is indefinitely divisible, so that a body is of necessity always made up of parts, and it does not make any difference how small it is or may be supposed to be, so that the notion of indivisible corpuscles is self-contradictory; but a notion of that kind evidently fits in well with a search for simplicity carried to such lengths that it can no longer correspond to the lowest degree of reality.

On the other hand, although the principial unity is absolutely indivisible, it can nevertheless be said to be of an extreme complexity, since it contains ‘eminently’ all that constitutes the essence or qualitative side of manifested beings, when considered from the point of view of a ‘descent’ into lower degrees. It is enough to go back to the explanation given above of the way in which the ‘extinction of the ego’ ought to be understood in order to see that unity is that wherein all quality subsists, ‘transformed’ and in its fullness, and that distinction, freed from all ‘separative’ limitation, is indeed carried therein to its highest level. As soon as the domain of manifested existence is entered, limitation appears in the form of the particular conditions that determine each state or each mode of manifestation; in the course of a descent to ever lower levels of existence limitation becomes ever narrower, and the possibilities inherent in the nature of beings become more restricted in range, which amounts to saying that the essence of these beings is correspondingly simplified; this simplification continues progressively toward a lower level than that of existence itself, that is to say toward the domain of pure quantity, where it is finally brought to its maximum through the complete suppression of every qualitative determination.

Thus it can be seen that simplification follows strictly the descending course which, in current terms as inspired by Cartesian dualism, would be described as leading from ‘spirit’ toward ‘matter’: inadequate as these terms may be as substitutes for ‘essence’ and ‘substance’, they can perhaps usefully be employed here for the sake of better understanding. It is therefore all the more extraordinary that anyone should attempt to apply this kind of simplification to things that belong to the ‘spiritual’ domain itself, or at least to as much of it as people are still able to conceive, for they go so far as to extend it to religious conceptions as well as to philosophical or scientific conceptions. The most typical example is that of Protestantism, in which simplification takes the form both of an almost complete suppression of rites, together with an attribution of predominance to morality over doctrine; and the doctrine itself becomes more and more simplified and diminished so that it is reduced to almost nothing, or at most to a few rudimentary formulas that anyone can interpret in any way that suits him. Moreover, Protestantism in its many forms is the only religious production of the modern spirit, and it arose at a time when that spirit had not yet come to the point of rejecting all religion, but was on the way toward doing so by virtue of the anti-traditional tendencies which are inherent in it and which really make it what it is. At the end-point of this ‘evolution’ (as it would be called today), religion is replaced by ‘religiosity’, that is to say by a vague sentimentality having no real significance; it is this that is acclaimed as ‘progress’, and it shows clearly how all normal relations are reversed in the modern mentality, for people try to see in it a ‘spiritualization’ of religion, as if the ‘spirit’ were a mere empty frame or an ‘ideal’ as nebulous as it is insignificant. This is what some of our contemporaries call a ‘purified religion’, but it is so only insofar as it is emptied of all positive content and has no longer any connection with any reality whatsoever.

Another thing worth noting is that all the self-styled ‘reformers’ constantly advertise their claim to be returning to a ‘primitive simplicity’, which has certainly never existed except in their imaginations. This may sometimes only be a convenient way of hiding the true character of their innovations, but it may also very often be a delusion of which they themselves are the victims, for it is frequently very difficult to determine to what extent the apparent promoters of the anti-traditional spirit are really conscious of the part they are playing, for they could not play it at all unless they themselves had a twisted mentality. Furthermore, it is difficult to see how the claim to primitive simplicity can be reconciled with the idea of ‘progress’, of which they simultaneously claim to be agents; the contradiction is enough by itself to indicate that there is something really abnormal in all this. However that may be, and confining attention to the idea of ‘primitive simplicity’, there seems to be no reason whatever why things should always begin by being simple and continue to get more complex: on the contrary, considering that the germ of any being must necessarily contain the virtuality of all that the being will be in the future, so that all the possibilities to be developed in the course of its existence must be included in the germ from the start, the conclusion that the origin of all things must really be exceedingly complex is inevitable. This gives an exact picture of the qualitative complexity of essence; the germ is small only in relation to quantity or substance, and by symbolically transposing the idea of ‘size’ it can be deduced through inverse analogy that what is least in quantity must be greatest in quality.[41] In a similar way every tradition at its origin contains the entire doctrine, comprehending in principle the totality of the developments and adaptations that may legitimately proceed from it, together with the totality of the applications to which they may give rise in all domains; human interventions can do nothing but restrict and diminish it, if they do not denature it altogether, and the work of all ‘reformers’ really consists in nothing more than that.

Another peculiar thing is that modernists of all sorts (taking into account not those of the West alone, but also those of the East, for the latter are in any case merely ‘Westernized’), while they boast of doctrinal simplicity as representing ‘progress’ in the field of religion, often speak as if religion ought to have been made for idiots, or at least as if they supposed that the people they are speaking to must inevitably be idiots; do they really think that by asserting, rightly or wrongly, that a doctrine is simple they are suggesting to a man of the most moderate intelligence a valid reason for adopting it? This is in the end no more than a manifestation of the ‘democratic’ idea, in the light of which, as was said earlier, it is desired that science too shall be ‘within the reach of all’. It is scarcely necessary to remark that these same ‘modernists’ are always, as a necessary consequence of their attitude, the declared enemies of all esoterism, for it goes without saying that esoterism, which is by definition only the concern of an elect, cannot be simple, so that its negation appears as an obligatory first stage in all attempts at simplification. As for religion properly so called, or more generally the exterior part of any tradition, it must admittedly be such that everyone can understand something of it, according to the range of his capacity, and in that sense it is addressed to all; but this does not mean that it must therefore be reduced to such a minimum that the most ignorant (this word not being used with reference to profane instruction, which has no importance here) or the least intelligent can grasp it: quite to the contrary, there must be in it something that is so to speak at the level of the possibilities of every individual, however exalted they may be, for thus alone can it furnish an appropriate ‘support’ to the interior aspect which, in any unmutilated tradition, is its necessary complement and belongs wholly to the initiatic order. But the modernists, in specifically rejecting esoterism and initiation, thereby deny that religious doctrines contain in themselves any profound significance; thus it is that, in their pretension to ‘spiritualize’ religion, they fall into its opposite, the narrowest and crudest ‘literalism’, in which the spirit is most completely lacking, thus affording a striking example of the fact that what Pascal said is often all too true — ‘He who tries to play the angel plays the beast.’

But that is not quite all that need be said about ‘primitive simplicity’, for there is at any rate one sense in which that expression can find a realistic application, and that is when the indistinction of ‘chaos’ is in question, for ‘chaos’ is in a way ‘primitive’ since it is ‘in the beginning’; but it is not there by itself, since all manifestation necessarily presupposes simultaneously and correlatively both essence and substance, and ‘chaos’ only represents its substantial base. If that were what the partisans of ‘primitive simplicity’ meant there would be no need to disagree with them, for the tendency to simplification would reach its end-point in precisely that indistinction, if it could be realized up to the limit of its ultimate consequences; but it is necessary to point out that this ultimate simplicity, being beneath manifestation and not in it, would in no way correspond to a true ‘return to origins’. In this connection and in order to resolve an apparent antinomy, a clear distinction must be made between the two points of view, which are respectively related to the two poles of existence: when it is said that the formation of the world started from ‘chaos’, then the point of view is solely the substantial, and the beginning must then be regarded as timeless, for obviously time does not exist in ‘chaos’ but only in the ‘cosmos’, so that if the order of development of manifestation is being taken into account (that order being reflected in the domain of corporeal existence, by virtue of the conditions which define that existence, as an order of temporal succession), the starting-point must not be the substantial pole, but the essential pole, the manifestation of which, in conformity with cyclic laws, takes the form of a continuous recession, or of a descent toward the substantial pole. The ‘creation’, inasmuch as it is a resolution of ‘chaos’, is in a sense ‘instantaneous’ and is properly the biblical Fiat Lux; but it is the primordial Light itself that is really the origination of the ‘cosmos’, and this Light is the ‘pure spirit’ in which are the essences of all things; such being its beginning, the manifested world cannot possibly do otherwise than move in a downward direction, getting ever nearer and nearer to ‘materiality’.