Civilization: When people talk about “civilization” they generally attribute a qualitative meaning to the term; now civilization only represents a value provided it is supra-human in origin and implies for the “civilized” man a sense of the sacred: only peoples who really have this sense and draw their life from it are truly civilized. If it is objected that this reservation does not take account of the whole meaning of the term and that it is possible to conceive of a world that is civilized though having no religion, the answer is that in this case the civilization is devoid of value, or rather – since there is no legitimate choice between the sacred and other things – that it is the most fallacious of aberrations. A sense of the sacred is fundamental for every civilization because fundamental for man; the sacred – that which is immutable, inviolable and thus infinitely majestic – is in the very substance of our spirit and of our existence. The world is miserable because men live beneath themselves; the error of modern man is that he wants to reform the world without having either the will or the power to reform man, and this flagrant contradiction, this attempt to make a better world on the basis of a worsened humanity, can only end in the very abolition of what is human, and consequently in the abolition of happiness too. Reforming man means binding him again to Heaven, re-establishing the broken link; it means tearing him away from the reign of the passions, from the cult of matter, quantity and cunning, and reintegrating him into the world of the spirit and serenity, we would even say: into the world of sufficient reason. [GTUFS: UIslam, Islam]
A civilization is integrated and healthy to the extent that it is founded on the “invisible” or “underlying” religion, the religio perennis; that is to say, to the extent that its expressions or its forms are transparent to the Formless and are turned towards the Origin, thus providing a vehicle for the recollection of a lost Paradise, but also, and with all the more reason, for the presentiment of a timeless Beatitude. For the Origin is at once within us and before us; time is but a spiroidal movement around a motionless Center. [GTUFS: LightAW, Religio Perennis]
The monk or the hermit, and every contemplative, though he be a king, lives as if in the antechamber of Heaven; on this very earth and in his carnal body he has attached himself to Heaven and enclosed himself in a prolongation of those crystallisations of Light that are the celestial states. That being so one can understand how monks or nuns can see in the monastic life their “Paradise on earth”; they are at rest in the Divine Will and wait in this world below for nothing but death, and in so doing they have already passed through death; they live here below as if in Eternity. The days as they succeed one another do but repeat always the same day of God; time stops in a single blessed day, and so is joined once more to the Origin which is also the Center. And it is this Elysian simultaneity that the ancient worlds have always had in view, at least in principle and in their nostalgia; a civilization is a “mystical body”, it is, in so far as that is possible, a collective contemplative. [GTUFS: LightAW, The Ancient Worlds in Perspective]

“Civilization”: The modern idea of “civilization” is not without relation, historically speaking, to the traditional idea of “empire”; but the “order” has become purely human and wholly profane, as the notion of “progress” proves, since it is the very negation of any celestial origin; “civilization” is in fact but urban refinement in the framework of a worldly and mercantile outlook, and this explains its hostility to virgin nature as well as to religion. According to the criteria of “civilization”, the contemplative hermit – who represents human spirituality and at the same time the sanctity of virgin nature – can be no better than a sort of “savage”, whereas in reality he is the earthly witness of Heaven. [GTUFS: LightAW, The Ancient Worlds in Perspective]