Ananda Coomaraswamy

I have, at the recommendation of Cologero at Gornahoor (to another reader/questioner) picked up AKC's collection of letters. The old excitement returns; the passion comes back. What is this glorious, transcendent world which is both made of adamantine, but grows, like the mountain in Daniel's dream, until its foundation and capstone is a tower dominating the world of the Cross?

Initial impressions:
AKC is on the side of the rigid traditionalists. This is to say, he is against nonsense. It is not a question of saying that "all religions are equals", but of recognizing that Christ's words are not primarily about moralistic "service" (which reduces God to "Patripassianism") or a Pharisee-like recognition of "Jesus Uber-All" or "Jesus Alone" (which essentially encourages the masses to reify their own understanding of what Christianity is with God, and ends up decaying into "all religions are roads to God, anyway", through Jesus), but rather about Truth in its exclusivity against error. Wasn't it Jesus who said not only "he who is not against us is with us", as well as the opposite? The difficulty is in recognizing Jesus, and we know from the Bible how difficult this is. AKC is far from being a relativist, quite the opposite; it is only the man who has traveled the straight and narrow path (wherever it may find him) who can look back and claim that God might have brought him by a different road, anyhow.

Tolkien and Primordialism

Source

This is a connection I was not surprised to learn of, & had speculated
whether it could exist, but was unsure of where to look for it. J. Godwin
appears to have outdone himself, here. Each manvantara is divided in the Purāṇic system into four Ages: the Kṛtā, Tretā, Dvāpara and Kali Yugas. The Greeks used the more evocative epithets of the Golden, Silver, Brass, and Iron Ages. Both mythologies relate that the sanctity and pleasantness of the Earth and its inhabitants are at their height during a Golden Age, after which they decline with accelerating rapidity until
the Iron Age, shortest and most wretched of all, during which human life,
correspondingly abbreviated, is beset by wars, plagues, famines, and all the
disasters that impiety brings upon the planet. Then at the very darkest hour
comes the Apocatastasis and the Age of Gold returns once more. Tolkien’s Ages each witness the growth of evil, leading to a bloody confrontation, after which a season of peace and plenty ensues. The closing chapters of The Lord of the Rings certainly seem to usher in a new Golden Age. But of course evil is never vanquished for ever: these cataclysms mark the periodic resolutions of discord into temporary concord. Only at the end of the manvantara will all conflict cease, but how and when this will be, not even the Ainur can tell.