A precursor for a major work.

This article first appeared in 1958 in Syntheses, a major multilingual European journal of political science that is still published today. In it, Boris Mouravieff, a historian at Geneva University who was also a teacher of Inner Christianity, presents one of two remarkable studies of the evolutionary crisis of 20th century Western Civilization in terms of the ancient Christian Esoteric Tradition that, as he says elsewhere as well as here, has kept itself alive to the present time hidden within the Eastern Church. The result is a series of unique insights into the inner meaning of our contemporary crisis. Not only this, but this article was clearly a milestone on the path to the formulation of the ideas since expanded in Mouravieff’s three volume Gnosis, study and commentaries on the esoteric tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy. Not only does this present text point to the origin of many of the ideas discussed in the larger work, but it puts in a simple and open way certain important ideas many of which had later been ‘buried deeper’ in the final book. As such, it expresses some of the ideas of that book more succinctly and more clearly, so that it throws considerable light on some of the most problematic areas of that text.