Collected essays on critqueing the belief in progress from a traditionalist point of view from which so-called progress oftens appears as regress.

Looking Back on Progress

Politics & Social Sciences

Lord Northbourne

Social Sciences

Angelico Press

A thoroughgoing critique of the modern world from the point of view of traditional metaphysics, pointing out the false assumptions at the root of many contemporary problems.

Religion in the Modern World: Including Correspondence with Thomas Merton

MERTON, THOMAS

Northbourne, Christopher James

Philosophy

Keys of Gnosis

"For a long time now, religion in the West has been polarized between a democratic kind of faith meant for simple believers, and divine mysteries so high that hardly anyone can claim to know much about them. The vital connecting link between them, that of metaphysical religion, is all but lost..." (From the Introduction.) There are many books that seek to answer the fundamental questions of life: Who am I? Does life have a purpose? How should I live? Dr Bolton's book brings to these universal questions an extraordinary degree of metaphysical insight. It contains in highly condensed form a veritable library of traditional wisdom, offering a systematic reconstruction of our understanding of the soul and its relation to archetypal reality. Its starting-point is the fact that increasing numbers of people seem to lack spiritual and material power over their own lives. Modern man feels like a victim. But true power, real freedom, is closer than we think. Our mistake lies in accepting a false view of the self, and neglecting the metaphysical dimension that gives access to eternity. Dr Bolton's book offers a crash-course in liberation. It can liberate us, specifically, from a common sense idea of reality which is profoundly false, and which holds us in unconscious slavery to time and appearances. The book defends the capacity of the human mind to obtain objective insight, despite the obfuscations of postmodernism, and represents a bold development of the Platonist tradition associated with St Augustine, Plotinus, and Proclus. "This book is like a diamond: a diamond placed not in a necklace, but at the business end of a drill. It is up to us to use the drill to penetrate reality. Writing the book was a great achievement. Reading it invites us to make the achievement our own." - Stratford Caldecott (G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture)

Bolton, Robert

The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah

Third Edition God, the Universe, and Man-their essential unity and fundamental attributes as seen through the eyes of Jewish esoteric tradition-is the subject of Leo Schaya's masterly study of the Kabbalah. Unlike most works on the subject, which focus on the history of the Kabbalah or the Kabbalah as literature (not to mention countless 'new age' rants), this penetrating text expounds the universal teachings of the Kabbalah on the relationships of all things to their supreme archetypes, the ten Sephiroth, or principial aspects of God. In addition to the Old Testament and the Talmud, Schaya draws on one of the classical sources of Jewish mysticism-the Zohar, or Book of Splendor-fromwhich he extracts an all-embracing synthesis of the numberless degrees of All-Reality, to which correspond the multiple states of human being, from earthly individuality to essential identity with the Absolute. This work, acclaimed by reviewers and scholars alike, fittingly concludes with an illuminating chapter on the Name of God, which saves 'all those who invoke him in truth.' Students of comparative religion will find an abundance of information here, for striking parallels both with the Hindu cosmological doctrines and the metaphysical insights of the Vedantic sages are among the surprises interlaced in this account of Judaic esoteric wisdom. In this, Schaya carries on the extraordinary work of three great 20th-century metaphysicians of the philosophia perennis: René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. This book will be extremely useful to anyone who is, in the words of Maimonides, 'perplexed' by the Bible in the sense of having exercised his best thinking about it and who now stands 'broken' before its apparent contradictions and its overwhelming emotional authority. The Kabbalah, or esotericism, is the communication to man of what Schaya calls principial ideas, ideas that are to thought and actions what the sun is to its rays. Standing between metaphysical ideas and the symbolic language of the Zohar and the Old Testament, he allows each side to penetrate the other. -Jacob Needleman, author of Lost Christianity, A Sense of the Cosmos, etc. This book fills an urgent need. To rediscover the deepest meaning of the Old Testament is something that could haved a most tonic and enlightening effect on the whole of Christian thought today; no clearer interpreters are to be found than the masters of the Kabbalah. -Marco Pallis, author of The Way and the Mountain, A Buddhist Spectrum, etc. Leo Schaya was born in Switzerland in 1916. He received a traditional Jewish upbringing, but from an early age devoted himself to the study of the great metaphysical doctrines of East and West, particularly those of Neoplatonism, Sufism, and theAdvaita Vedanta. His works include, in addition to The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah (first published in French in 1958 as L'Homme et l'Absolu selon la Kabbale), La Doctrine Soufique de l'Unité, La création en Dieu: à la lumière du judaïsme, du christianisme et l'islam, and Naissance à l'esprit, as well as numerous articles.

Religion & Spirituality

Schaya, Léo

Judaism

Our Father who art in heaven. . . . Two thousand years have elapsed since these words were first spoken from the Mount of the Beatitudes. Since that time countless sermons and commentaries have echoed these words, but never has the Lord's Prayer been likened to such an array of spiritual themes: the Commandments, the Divine Liturgy, the virtues, the Gospels, and then the Apocalypse and the Psalms are all taken in turn and formed into "verbal icons." This is an eminently practical book to be not so much quoted as lived, a modern quest for the heart of Scripture.  "In The Way to Our Heavenly Father, G. John Champoux has given us a great gift, a profound and wide-ranging meditation on the Lord's Prayer. It's hard to imagine anyone reading this book carefully--or even dipping into it casually--without coming across a passage that will magnify understanding, inspire hope, and deepen faith. A splendid achievement!" -- Philip Zaleski, editor of The Best American Spiritual Writing series and co-author of Prayer: A History  "There is more mystery and majesty here than can be taken in by mere reading. This is a book to linger over prayerfully, as it reveals how the depths of Jesus's outwardly simple prayer can be heard resounding through the millennia." -- Frederica Mathewes-Green, author of Facing East: A Pilgrim's Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy

The Way to Our Heavenly Father: A Contemplative Telling of the Lord's Prayer

G. John Champoux

History

Jean Hani’s The Black Virgin: A Marian Mystery differs from his previous writings through its sharper theological focus. In Hani’s view, the key to the enigma of the Black Virgin was given at Lourdes by Mary herself: in declaring herself The Immaculate Conception, she initiated us into the Marian Mystery in all its profundity. And it is precisely through an apprehension of the Mystery as a whole that the ultimate meaning of the Black Virgin can be grasped. Chapters include: The Black Icon—Regina Mundi—The Mother of God—“I am Black but Beautiful”—Woman “Through his research into hidden or lost meanings, Jean Hani has revealed and restored to our attention the most ‘initiatic’ dimensions of the Christian religion.” Jean Borella, author of The Secret of the Christian Way, and The Crisis of Religious Symbolism (forthcoming from Angelico Press)

The Black Virgin: A Marian Mystery

HANI, JEAN

Christian Books & Bibles

That sacred art scarcely exists today is all too clear. We can perhaps speak of a “religious,” but certainly not a sacred art. True sacred art is not sentimental or psychological, but ontological and cosmological in nature. Sacred art cannot be the result of the feelings, fantasies, or even “thought” of the artist—as with most modern art—but rather the translation of a reality largely surpassing the limits of human individuality. Sacred art is precisely a supra-human art. The temple of former times was an “instrument” of recollection, joy, sacrifice, and exaltation. First through the harmonious combination of a thousand crafted symbols, then by offering itself as a receptacle to the symbols of the liturgy. For the temple and the liturgy together constitute a prodigious formula capable of preparing man to become aware of the descent of Grace, of the epiphany of the Spirit in corporeity. It is a matter of urgency, then, to recall what is true in sacred art, especially since in the cultural wasteland of our age signs of resistance to its anarchy and subversion manifest themselves, and a pressing call is felt to recover the traditional conceptions that must form the basis and condition of any restoration.
 “Through his research into hidden or lost meanings, Jean Hani has revealed and restored to our attention the most ‘initiatic’ dimensions of the Christian religion.” Jean Borella, author of The Secret of the Christian Way, and The Crisis of Religious Symbolism (forthcoming from Angelico Press)

The Symbolism of the Christian Temple

Divine Craftsmanship: Preliminaries to a Spirituality of Work

In what way can human beings attain that Harmony whereby they become mediators between Heaven and Earth? In the mysterious language of symbols we can rediscover the sense of vocation that reflects Divine Activity. For God is, in reality, the sole Artisan. All the traditional crafts strive to imitate within their limitations the work of God, Who unceasingly creates and maintains the world. And in the end it is this that constitutes the sole foundation of the dignity of work. That is why this book seeks to bring us to an interior knowledge of God as Divine Artisan.
 Chapters include: The Divine Scribe—Christ the Physician—The Warrior God— The Divine Potter—God the Weaver—God the Architect and Mason—The ‘Son of the Carpenter’—Pastor et Nauta— God the Fisherman and God the Hunter—The Celestial Gardener—The Master of the Harvest—The Master of the Vineyard—The Spirituality of Work and the Body Social.
 “Through his research into hidden or lost meanings, Jean Hani has revealed and restored to our attention the most ‘initiatic’ dimensions of the Christian religion.” Jean Borella, author of The Secret of the Christian Way, and The Crisis of Religious Symbolism (forthcoming from Angelico Press)

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Crafts & Hobbies

Without doubt, the gravest symptom in the crisis the Western Church is currently undergoing—the effects of which on art have already denounced in the author’s book The Symbolism of the Christian Temple—is the calling into question of the very meaning and content of the Mass, given that it is the heart and vital center of the Church. The intention of this book, however, is not to engage in theological disputes directly, but rather to survey the field from the vantage-point of the history of religion, and to unravel the characteristics of the Christian liturgy that link it to the universality of the sacred.
 “Through his research into hidden or lost meanings, Jean Hani has revealed and restored to our attention the most ‘initiatic’ dimensions of the Christian religion.” Jean Borella, author of The Secret of the Christian Way, and The Crisis of Religious Symbolism (forthcoming from Angelico Press)

The Divine Liturgy: Insights Into Its Mystery

Science and Myth: What We Are Never Told

In Science and Myth the author shows, in the first place, that science too has its mythology, unrecognized and unacknowledged though the fact be. These scientistic myths, however, turn out to constitute what he terms anti-myths: "a kind that would banish all others, and in so doing, undermine not only religion and morality, but indeed all culture in its higher modes." What invalidates the contemporary "scientific" world-view and renders it "mythical" in the pejorative sense, he goes on to contend, proves finally to be the underlying hypothesis that human perception terminates, not in an external object, but in a subjective phantasm. Not only does the author maintain cogently that visual perception, in particular, does penetrate to the external world, but basing himself on traditional sources-fromVedic to Biblical-he shows that sight as such opens in principle to a veritable gnosis: a "seeing of the Real."

Smith, Wolfgang

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