Learning from Bosnia: Approaching Tradition

Prologue

Prologue Every ideology offers the promise of an end to killing. And yet the killing continues to this day—and it is unreasonable to hope that there will be none in the future. Both the promise that it will end and the likelihood that the promise will not be honored accompany the ritualization of violence and killings. After the Holocaust, every understanding of the world, humankind, and God that has been proffered and developed within the enterprise of modernity as a whole should have been subjected to critical reexamination. Nothing should have been spared scrutiny through the lens of different perspectives and different values. What happened in Bosnia was merely yet another testimony to the fact that neither the promises nor the killings have come to an end. But no thorough reexamination of the major worldviews and proclamations of the modern European age has been undertaken, nor is there any prospect that it will be. In the accounts of the Truth belonging to the Semitic tradition, the world began with Eden, and in Eden there was the serpent. The question is whether it will end with nothing but the serpent, a serpent that will have devoured the entire world, snatching at the very last bird. Perhaps the notion of the perfectibility of the human self1 and the understanding, derived from this notion, of achieving a shift from the old suffering to a new concord, is a perpetual spur to violence and killing . If the only credible sciences are those that regard the quantifiable world as the sole world, human perfection is denied. The human individual then becomes a factor that changes both itself and the world, but 2 / Learning from Bosnia with the premise that its self, too, is definable and therefore quantifiable . It consciously sacrifices its perfectibility for the sake of the uncertain promises of science, and reduces everything to manifestations without a Reality that transcends them and without the openness of the self as the channel and release for all its contingencies, its conditionalities . Are both the world and the human individual really present as a nonperfectibility that they can themselves eliminate by persistent change and shifts in thought? Is there in the individual an inspired, imbued , uncreated, and uncreatable center in relation to which it is always perfect? These questions, which touch on crucial understandings of the self and authority, and of the self-regarding insularity of being, would appear to be capable of leading to a more informed insight into the disregard of God, the world, and humankind and, concomitantly, the shift of focus toward outlooks in which evil and good, suffering and concord would be discerned as other than a manifestation of ever-increasing tribulations. For is not every movement mere chaos unless it derives from, is guided by, and bears witness to Peace? Are not all the signs in the outer world and the inner world of the self, the macrocosm and the microcosm, meaningless if they do not praise the Silence? As Ananda K. Coomaraswamy says: ‘‘Our experience of ‘life’ is evolutionary: what evolves? Evolution is reincarnation, the death of one and the rebirth of another in momentary continuity: who reincarnates? Metaphysics prescinds from the animistic proposition of Descartes, Cogito ergo sum, to say, Cogito ergo EST; and to the question, Quid est? answers that this is an improper question, because its subject is not a what amongst others but the whatness of them all and of all that they are not.’’2 This is an essay in which the shifts and reversals, exertions and easing of tension in addressing the unanswered questions of the Bosnian destiny are tested in the hope of discovering the ignorance, the nonknowledge that calls for confirmation in knowledge. The current state of the world is inevitably reflected in every occurrence of the day. Some reflections, however, are sharper and more composed. The prevailing preoccupation with knowledge without an awareness of the Ineffable, with motion without focus on Peace, and with plurality uncorroborated by Unicity, makes the individual ever feebler and ever more distanced from the Truth, the Way, and Virtue, the essence of the perennial wis- Prologue / 3 dom in all the profusion of its language and meaning. For this reason, the Bosnian experience is a universal experience. It does not offer any new knowledge, for upheavals and slaughter are everywhere. But perhaps it might inspire a critically...