Ecumenism if correctly understood must be an esoteric...

Ecumenism if correctly understood must be an esoteric activity if it is to avoid becoming the instrument for simple relativization and further secularization.4 To be sure, in traditional worlds esoteric knowledge did not have to concern itself with other universes of meaning and alien sacred forms, except in very rare and exceptional conditions.

Usually this interiorizing knowledge concerned itself with the particular religious world in which it functioned, as well as the soul of human beings and the grand phenomena of nature. Traditional sages would speak of the essence or meaning behind the form of a particular verse of their sacred scripture or religious rite. Likewise, they might explain the symbolic significance of the growth of a plant toward sunlight or certain images and states of the human soul.

Rarely would a Buddhist sage provide a sapiential commentary upon the verses of the Quran or a Hindu be concerned with the specific inner meaning of a particular Christian rite, even if they would in a general way accept the universality of the Truth in alien religious worlds.

The exceptions did, however, exist, as when Islam and Hinduism encountered each other in the Indian subcontinent;5 but these cases remained more than anything else an exception and even then were not carried out in a barren desert where a living, homogeneous spiritual universe of form and meaning had ceased to exist.

The full application of scientia sacra to the study of religions on a worldwide scale had to be preserved for modern times as both a compensation from Heaven for the secularization of human life and a cyclic event of the greatest importance, which signified the unraveling and explaining of the inner meaning of not one but all the living traditions of mankind in the light of tradition itself before the present human cycle terminates.

Strangely enough, although this traditional exposition of the various religions, their doctrines, rites, and symbols, and their relation to the Truth which they all contain inwardly and which they reflect has been neglected to a large extent in the modern world, the concern with the presence of other religions has been impossible to avoid.

A sensitive and intelligent person today who is touched by those complicated sets of factors and forces which we call modernism cannot but be concerned with the multiplicity of sacred forms.