Western

If the WESTERNer – “free thinker” or not – has a tendency to “think for himself,” wrongly or rightly according to the case, this is due to distant causes; the WESTERN mind expressed itself through Plato and Aristotle before having undergone the influence of Christian fideism, and even then, and from the very outset, it could not help having recourse to the Greek philosophers. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism

As regards the question of WESTERN rationality, … the following must be taken into account: the “critical mind,” if one may so express it, developed in a world where everything is called into question and where intelligence is continually forced into a state of self-defense; whereas the East has been able to slumber in the shade of the sacred and of the conventional, in the security of a religious universe without fissures. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism

WESTERNers are moreover compelled to admit this themselves: ‘The notion of philosophy came to have a different meaning for the Eastern and WESTERN Churches, in the sense that for the Greeks it comprised quasi organically a large proportion of religious theories (dass der Begrjff ‘Philosophie’ dort ganz wesenhaft viel religiöse Weltanschauungskunde umfasste), while for the Latins it contained, intentionally or involuntarily, the seed which ultimately led to the total separation of religion and rationalist science (der zur vollkommenen Dualisierung von Religion und Gedankenwissenschaft führen sollte). sophiaperennis: Philosophy and Christianity

Kierkegaard’s “existence” nullifies itself through lack of sufficient reason; how is it possible to conceive of an “existential” morality, that is to say, a morality which is “lived and not thought” and therefore immune to “abstraction,” at the level of terrestrial man who is a thinking being by definition? This alternative between “existence” and “thought-abstraction” is the fundamental misunderstanding in existentialism; indeed the latter is simply one of the most aberrant manifestations of what may be described as WESTERN alternativism. (NA: What is one to say of a philosopher who “thinks” cheerfully about the insincerity or the mediocrity of “thought” as such? Inept though that may be, an audience is never lacking for such literary artifices of a mentally compressed city dweller.) sophiaperennis: Kierkegaard

The WESTERN spirit has always lived to a large extent on alternatives: either it has confined thought and life within real but fragmentary and hence unbalancing alternatives (pleasure and pain, for example), or else it has erected false alternatives in the course of its philosophical “researches” or in its destructive pursuit of originality and change. sophiaperennis: Kierkegaard

In the case of the examples just mentioned, we are obviously at the antipodes, not perhaps of certain medieval miniatures nor of the noblest and most spring-like works of the Quattrocento, but of the dramatic titanism, and the fleshly and vulgar delirium, of the megalomaniacs of the Renaissance and the 17th century, infatuated with anatomy, turmoil, marble and gigantism. Non-traditional art, about which a few words must be said here, embraces the classical art of antiquity and the Renaissance, and Continues up to the 19th century which, reacting against academicism, gives rise to impressionism and analogous styles; this reaction rapidly decomposes into all sorts of perversities, either “abstract” or “surrealistic”: in any case, it is of “subrealism” that one ought to speak here. It goes without saying that worthwhile works are to be found incidentally both in impressionism and in Classicism – in which we include romanticism, since its technical principles are the same -, for the cosmic qualities cannot but manifest themselves in this realm, and a given individual aptitude cannot but lend itself to this manifestation; but these exceptions, in which the positive elements succeed in neutralizing the erroneous or insufficient principles, are far from being able to compensate for the serious drawbacks of extratraditional art, and we would gladly do without all its productions if it were possible to disencumber the world from the heavy mortgage of WESTERN culturism, with its vices of impiety, dispersion and poisonousness. The least that one can say is that it is not this kind of grandeur that brings us closer to Heaven. “Suffer the little children to come unto ME and forbid them not; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

This culturism is practically synonymous with civilizationism, and thus with implicit racism; according to this prejudice, WESTERN humanity proves its superiority by the “Greek miracle” and all its consequences, and thus by the anthropolatry – it is not for nothing that one speaks of humanism – and cosmolatry which characterize or rather constitute the classicist mentality. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

When 3 is multiplied by 4, the product is 12; it is neither 11 nor 13, but expresses exactly the conjugated powers of the multiplicand and of the multiplier. Likewise, metaphorically speaking, when the Christian religion is multiplied by WESTERN humanity, the product is the Middle Ages; it is neither the age of the barbarian invasions nor that of the Renaissance. When a living organism has reached its maximum of growth, it is what it should be; it should neither stop short at the infantile state nor should it grow on indefinitely. The norm does not lie in hypertrophy, it lies at the exact limit of normal development. The same holds good for civilizations. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

If we compare St Louis and Louis XIV, we could of course confine ourselves to saying that they represent different ages, which is either a truism or an error; it is a truism to assert that every man lives in his own age, and it is an error to declare that the difference between the two French kings, or more precisely between the worlds in which they live and which they incarnate, is only a difference of time. The real difference is that St Louis represents WESTERN Christianity in the full development of its normal and normative possibilities, whereas Louis XIV represents something entirely different, namely that substitute for religion, or for Christendom, which calls itself “Civilization”; admittedly, Christianity is still included in this but the emphasis is elsewhere, namely on the titanesque and worldly humanism, which is strangely hostile to virgin nature, following the example of ancient Rome. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

Outward forms are criteria in this regard. It is either false or insufficient to allege that St Louis wore the costume of his period and that, mutatis mutandis, Louis XIV did the same; the truth is that St Louis wore the dress of a WESTERN Christian king, whereas Louis XIV wore that of a monarch who was already more “civilized” than Christian, the first epithet referring, needless to say, to “civilizationism” and not to civilization in the general sense of the word. The appearance of St Louis is that of an idea which has reached the fullness of its ripening; it marks, not a phase, but a thing accomplished, a thing which is entirely what it ought to be. (NA: The appearance of Clovis or Charlemagne might be that of a perfect Germanic type or of a perfect monarch, but it could not epitomize WESTERN Christendom in an age when its constituent elements were as yet uncombined and had not yet interpenetrated.) The appearance of a king of the Renaissance or of the age immediately following is the appearance, not of a thing, but of a phase – nor yet even a phase, but an extravagant episode; whereas we have no difficulty in taking seriously the appearance not only of a St Louis, but also of a Pharoah, an Emperor of China, or for that matter, a Red Indian chief, it is impossible to escape an impression of ridiculousness when confronted by the famous portraits of certain kings. These portraits, or rather these poses and these accoutrements, which the portraits so humourlessly and pitilessly fix, are supposed to combine all imaginable sublimities, some of which cannot in fact be fitted together into a single formula, for it is impossible to have everything at one and the same time; the hieratic and as it were incorporeal splendour of a Christian emperor cannot be piled up on top of the paradisal naked splendour of an ancient hero. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

Be that as it may, we should like to point out here that the chronic imbalance that characterizes WESTERN humanity has two principal causes, the antagonism between Aryan paganism and Semitic Christianity on the one hand, and the antagonism between Latin rationality and Germanic imaginativeness on the other. (NA: From the point of view of spiritual worth, it is contemplativity that is decisive, whether it is combined with reason or with imagination, or with any kind of sensibility.) The Latin Church, with its sentimental and unrealistic idealism, has created a completely unnecessary scission between clergy and laity, whence a perpetual uneasiness on the part of the latter towards the former; it has moreover, without taking account of their needs and tastes, imposed on the Germanic peoples too many specifically Latin solutions, forgetting that a religious and cultural framework, in order to be effective, must adapt itself to the mental requirements of those on whom it is imposed. And since, in the case of Europeans, their creative gifts far exceed their contemplative gifts – the role of Christianity should have been to re-establish equilibrium by accentuating contemplation and canalizing creativity, – the West excels in “destroying what it has worshipped”; also the history of WESTERN civilization is made up of cultural treacheries that are difficult to understand, – one is astonished at so much lack of understanding, ingratitude and blindness, – and these treacheries appear most visibly, it goes without saying, in their formal manifestations, in other words, in the human ambience which, in normal conditions, ought to suggest a sort of earthly Paradise or heavenly Jerusalem, with all their beatific symbolism and stability. The Renaissance, at its apogee, replaces happiness with pride; the baroque reacts against this pride or this crushing coldness with a false happiness, cut off from its divine roots and full of a bragadoccio that is both exaggerated and frenzied. The reaction to this reaction was a pagan classicism leading to the bourgeois ugliness, both crude and mediocre, of the 19th century; this has nothing to do with the real people or with a popular craftsmanship that is still authentic, and which remains more or less on the margin of history and bears witness to a wholesomeness very far from all civilizationist affectation. (NA: Popular art moreover is often the vehicle of primordial, especially solar, symbols, and one finds it in peoples very far removed from one another, sometimes in forms that are identical down to the last detail.) sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

Sensible forms therefore correspond with exactness to intellections, and it is for this reason that traditional art has rules which apply the cosmic laws and universal principles to the domain of forms, and which, beneath their more general outward aspect, reveal the ‘style’ of the civilization under consideration, this ‘style’ in its turn rendering explicit the form of intellectuality of that civilization. When art ceases to be traditional and becomes human, individual, and therefore arbitrary, that is infallibly the sign – and secondarily the cause – of an intellectual decline, a weakening, which, in the sight of those who know how to ‘discriminate between the spirits’ and who look upon things with an unprejudiced eye, is expressed by the more or less incoherent and spiritually insignificant, we would go even as far as to say unintelligible character of the forms. (NA: We are referring here to the decadence of certain branches of religious art during the Gothic period, especially in its latter part, and to WESTERN art as a whole from the Renaissance onward: Christian art (architecture, sculpture, painting, liturgical goldsmithery, etc.), which formerly was sacred, symbolical, spiritual, had to give way before the invasion of neo-antique and naturalistic, individualistic and sentimental art; this art, which contained absolutely nothing ‘miraculous’- no matter what those who believe in the ‘Greek miracle’ may care to think – is quite unfitted for the transmission of intellectual intuitions and no longer even answers to collective psychic aspirations; it is thus as far removed as can be from intellectual contemplation and takes into consideration feelings only; on the other hand, feeling lowers itself in proportion as it fulfils the needs of the masses, until it finishes up in a sickly and pathetic vulgarity. It is strange that no one has understood to what a degree this barbarism of forms, which reached a zenith of empty and miserable exhibitionism in the period of Louis XV, contributed – and still contributes – to driving many souls (and by no means the worst) away from the Church; they feel literally choked in surroundings which do not allow their intelligence room to breathe. Let us note in passing that the historical connection between the new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome – of the Renaissance period, therefore anti-spiritual and rhetorical, ‘human’ if so preferred – and the origin of the Reformation are unfortunately very far from fortuitous.) sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

It has often been noticed that Oriental peoples, including those reputed to be the most artistic, show themselves for the most part entirely lacking in aesthetical discernment with regard to whatever comes to them from the West. All the ugliness born of a world more and more devoid of spirituality spreads over the East with unbelievable facility, not only under the influence of politico-economic factors, which would not be so surprising, but also by the free consent of those who, by all appearances, had created a world of beauty, that is a civilization, in which every expression, including the most modest, bore the imprint of the same genius. Since the very beginning of WESTERN infiltration, it has been astonishing to see the most perfect works of art set side by side with the worst trivialities of industrial production, and these disconcerting contradictions have taken place not only in the realm of ‘art products’, but in nearly every sphere, setting aside the fact that in a normal civilization, everything accomplished by man is related to the domain of art, in some respects at least. The answer to this paradox is very simple, however, and we have already outlined it in the preceding pages: it resides in the fact that forms, even the most unimportant, are the work of human hands in a secondary manner only; they originate first and foremost from the same supra-human source from which all tradition originates, which is another way of saying that the artist who lives in a traditional world devoid of ‘rifts’, works under the discipline or the inspiration of a genius which surpasses him; fundamentally he is but the instrument of this genius, if only from the fact of his craftsman’s qualification. (NA: ‘A thing is not only what it is for the senses, but also what it represents. Natural or artifi cial objects are not . . . arbitrary ” symbols” of such or such a different or superior reality; but they are.., the effective manifestation of that reality: the eagle or the lion, for example, is not so much the symbol or the image of the Sun as it is the Sun under one of its manifest ations (the essential form being more important than the nature in which it manifests itself); in the same way, every house is the world in effigy and every altar is situated at the centre of the earth . . . ‘ (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: ‘The Primitive Mentality’ in Etudes Traditionnelles, Paris, Chacornac, August-September-October, 1939). It is solely and exclusively traditional art – in the widest sense of the word, implying all that is of an externally formal order, and therefore a fortiori everything which belongs in some way or other to the ritual domain – it is only this art, transmitted with tradition and by tradition, which can guarantee the adequate analogical correspondence between the divine arid the cosmic orders on the one hand, and the human or ‘artistic’ order on the other. As a result, the traditional artist does not limit himself simply to imitating Nature, but to ‘imitating Nature in her manner of operation’ (St. Thomas Aquinas, Sum. Theol. I, qu. 117, a. I) and it goes without saying that the artist cannot, with his own individual means, improvise such a ‘cosmological’ operation. It is by the entirely adequate conformity of the artist to this ‘manner of operation’, a conformity which is subordinated to the rules of tradition, that the masterpiece is created; in other words, this conformity essentially presupposes a knowledge, which may be either personal, direct and active, or inherited, indirect and passive, the latter case being that of those artisans who, unconscious as individuals of the metaphysical content of the forms they have learned to create, know not how to resist the corrosive influence of the modern West.) Consequently, individual taste plays only a relatively subordinate part in the production of the forms of such an art, and this taste will be reduced to nothing as soon as the individual finds himself face to face with a form which is foreign to the spirit of his own Tradition; that is what happens in the case of a people unfamiliar with WESTERN civilization when they encounter the forms imported from the West. However, for this to happen, it is necessary that the people accepting such confusion should no longer be fully Conscious of their own spiritual genius, or in other terms, that they should no longer be capable of understanding the forms with which they are still surrounded and in which they live; it is in fact a proof that the people in question are already suffering from a certain decadence. Because of this fact, they are led to accept modern ugliness all the more easily because it may answer to certain inferior possibilities that those people are already spontaneously seeking to realize, no matter how, and it may well be quite subconsciously; therefore, the unreasoning readiness with which only too many Orientals (possibly even the great majority) accept things which are utterly incompatible with the spirit of their Tradition is best explained by the fascination exercised over an ordinary person by something corresponding to an as yet unexhausted possibility, this possibility being, in the present case, simply that of arbitrariness or want of principle. However that may be, and without wishing to attach too much importance to this explanation of what appears to be the complete lack of taste shown by Orientals, there is one fact which is absolutely certain, namely that very many Orientals themselves no longer understand the sense of the forms they inherited from their ancestors, together with their whole Tradition. All that has just been said applies of course first and foremost and a fortiori to the nations of the West themselves who, after having created – we will not say ‘invented’- a perfect traditional art, proceeded to disown it in favour of the residues of the individualistic and empty art of the Graeco-Ro mans, which has finally led to the artistic chaos of the modern world. We know very well that there are some who will not at any price admit the unintelligibility or the ugliness of the modern world, and who readily employ the word ‘aesthetic’, with a derogatory nuance similar to that attaching to the words ‘picturesque’ and ‘romantic’, in order to discredit in advance the importance of forms, so that they may find themselves more at ease in the enclosed system of their own barbarism. Such an attitude has nothing surprising in it when it concerns avowed modernists, but it is worse than illogical, not to say rather despicable, coming from those who claim to belong to the Christian civilization; for to reduce the spontaneous and normal language of Christian art – a language the beauty of which can hardly be questioned – to a worldly matter of ‘taste’- as if medieval art could have been the product of mere caprice – amounts to admitting that the signs stamped by the genius of Christianity on all its direct and indirect expressions were only a contingency unrelated to that genius and devoid of serious importance, or even due to a mental inferiority; for ‘only the spirit matters’- so say certain ignorant people imbued with hypocritical, iconoclastic, blasphemous and impotent puritanism, who pronounce the word ‘spirit’ all the more readily because they are the last to know what it really stands for. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

In order to understand better the causes of the decadence of art in the West, one must take into account the fact that there is in the European mentality a certain dangerous ‘idealism’ which is not without relevance to that decadence, nor yet to the decay of WESTERN civilization as a whole. This ‘idealism’ has found its fullest, one might say its most ‘intelligent’ expression in certain forms of Gothic art, those in which a kind of ‘dynamism’ is predominant, which seems to aim at taking away the heaviness from stone. As for Byzantine and Romanesque art, as well as that other side of Gothic art wherein a ‘static’ power has been preserved, it might be said that it is an essentially intellectual art, therefore ‘realistic’. The ‘flamboyant’ Gothic art, no matter how ‘passionate’ it became, was nevertheless still a traditional art except in the case of sculpture and painting which were already well on the way to decadence; to be more exact, it was the ‘swansong’ of Gothic art. From the time of the Renaissance, which represents a sort of ‘posthumous revenge’ on the part of classical antiquity, European ‘idealism’ flowed into the exhumed sarcophagi of the Graeco-Roman civilization. By this act of suicide, idealism placed itself at the service of an individualism in which it thought to have rediscovered its own genius, only to end up, after a number of intermediate stages, in the most vulgar and wildest affirmations of that individualism. This was really a double suicide: firstly the forsaking of medieval or Christian art, and secondly the adoption of Graeco-Roman forms which intoxicated the Christian world with the poison of their decadence. But it is necessary here to consider a possible objection: was not the art of the first Christians in fact Roman art? The answer is that the real beginnings of Christian art are to be found in the symbols inscribed in the catacombs, and not in the forms that the early Christians, themselves in part belonging to the Roman civilization, temporarily borrowed in a purely outward manner from the ‘classical’ decadence. Christianity was indeed called upon to replace this decadence by an art springing spontaneously from an original spiritual genius, and if in fact certain Roman influences have always persisted in Christian art, this only applies to more or less superficial details. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

It has just been stated that European ‘idealism’ allied itself to individualism and ended by identifying itself with the crudest expressions of the latter. As for those things that the West finds crude’ in other civilizations, they are nearly always only the more or less superficial aspects of a ‘realism’ that scorns delusive and hypocritical veils. However, one should not lose sight of the fact that ‘idealism’ is not bad in itself inasmuch as it finds its place in the minds of heroes, always inclined towards ‘sublimation’; what is bad, and at the same time specifically WESTERN, is the intrusion of this mentality into every sphere, including those in which it has no place. It is this distorted ‘idealism’, all the more fragile and dangerous because it is distorted, that Islam, with its desire for equilibrium and stability – in other words ‘realism’- wished to avoid at all costs, having taken, moreover, into consideration the restricted possibilities of the present cyclic period, already far removed from its origin; herein lies the reason for that ‘earthly’ aspect with which Christians are wont to reproach the Islamic civilization. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

Science is supposed to inform us not only about what is in space but also about what is in time. As for the first-named category of knowledge, no one denies that WESTERN science has accumulated an enormous quantity of observations, but as for the second category, which ought to reveal to us what one abysses of duration hold, science is more ignorant than any Siberian shaman, who can at least relate his ideas to a mythology, and thus to an adequate symbolism. There is of course a gap between the physical knowledge – necessarily restricted – of a primitive hunter and that of a modem physicist; but measured against the extent of knowable things, that gap is a mere milliliter.(Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 36). sophiaperennis: Limits of modern science

Science is supposed to inform us not only about what is in space but also about what is in time. As for the first-named category of knowledge, no one denies that WESTERN science has accumulated an enormous quantity of observations, but as for the second category, which ought to reveal to us what the abysses of duration hold, science is more ignorant than any Siberian shaman, who can at least relate his ideas to a mythology, and thus to an adequate symbolism. There is of course a gap between the physical knowledge – necessarily restricted – of a primitive hunter and that of a modem physicist; but measured against the extent of knowable things, that gap is a mere milliliter. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

Science is supposed to inform us not only about what is in space but also what is in time. As for the first-named category of knowledge, no one denies that WESTERN science has accumulated an enormous quantity of observations, but as for the second category, which ought to reveal us what the abysses of duration hold, science is more ignorant than any Siberian shaman, who can at least relate his ideas to a mythology, and thus to an adequate symbolism. There is of course a gap between the physical knowledge — necessarily restricted — of a primitive hunter and that of a modern physicist; but measured against the extent of knowable things, that gap is a mere millimeter. sophiaperennis: Sciences and precision

The word ‘gnosis’… refers to supra-rational , and thus purely intellective, knowledge of metacosmic realities. Now this knowledge cannot be reduced to the ‘gnosticism’ of history; it would then be necessary to say that Ibn ‘Arabi or Shankara were Alexandrine gnostics; in short, gnosis cannot be held responsible for every association of ideas or every abuse of terminology. It is humanly admissible not to believe in gnosis; what is quite inadmissible in anyone claiming to understand the subject is to include under this heading things having no relation of species or level with the reality in question, whatever the value attributed to that reality. In place of ‘gnosis’ the Arabic term ma’rifah or the Sanskrit tern jnana could just as well have been used, but a WESTERN term seems more normal in a book written in a WESTERN language; there is also the term ‘theosophy’, but his has even more unfortunate associations, while the term ‘knowledge’ is too general, unless its meaning is made specific by an epithet or by the context. What must be emphasized and made clear is that the term ‘gnosis’ is used by us in its etymological and universal sense and therefore cannot be reduced to meaning merely the Graeco-Oriental syncretism of later classical times, (NA: Even though we do not reduce the meaning of this word to that syncretism we nevertheless admit for clear and historical reasons that the heretics conventionally called Gnostics can properly be so called. Their first fault lay in misinterpreting gnosis in a dogmatical mode, this giving rise to errors and a sectarianism incompatible with a sapiential perspective: despite this the indirect connection with genuine gnosis can, if need be, justify the use of the term Gnostic in this case. (Understanding Islam, p.115).) still less can it be applied to some pseudo-religious pseudo-yogic or even merely literary fantasy. (NA: As is more and more often done since psychoanalysts (in the widest sense of the term) have arrogated to themselves a monopoly in all that concerns the inner life, where they confuse together the most diverse and irreconcilable things in a common process of leveling and relativization. (Understanding Islam, p.115).) (Understanding Islam, p.115). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

In a quite general way, that which calls for suspicion and for implacable vigilance is the reducing of the spiritual to the psychic, a practice which by now has become a commonplace to the point of characterizing WESTERN interpretations of the traditional doctrines. This so-called ‘psychology of spirituality’ or this ‘psychoanalysis of the sacred’ is the breach through which the mortal poison of modern relativism infiltrates into the still living Oriental traditions. According to Jung the figurative emergence of certain contents of the ‘collective unconscious’ is accompanied empirically, as its psychic complement, by a noumenal sensation of eternity and infinitude. This is the way to ruin insidiously all transcendence and all intellection, for, according to this theory, it is the collective unconscious, or subconscious, which is at the origin of ‘individuated’ consciousness, human intelligence having two components, namely the reflection of the subconscious on the one hand and the experience of the external world on the other ; but since experience is not in itself intelligence, on this showing intelligence will have the subconscious for its substance, so that one has to try and define the subconscious on the basis of its own ramification. This is the classical contradiction of all subjectivist and relativist philosophy. (The Essentials Writings of Frithjof Schuon, p. 219) sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

The interest in Zen manifested of late years in the WESTERN countries has resulted from an understandable reaction against the coarseness and ugliness prevalent in the world today, and also from a certain weariness in regard to concepts rightly or wrongly judged to be inoperative; while on the other hand people have tended to feel increasingly bored by the habitual philosophical battles of words. Unfortunately, these justifiable motives get only too easily mingled with anti-intellectual and falsely ‘concretist’ tendencies – this was only to be expected – in which case the reaction becomes deprived of all effective value. For it is one thing to take up a stand beyond of the scope of the thinking faculty and another to remain far short of that faculty’s highest possibilities even while imagining one has transcended things of which one does not comprehend the first word. He who truly rises above verbal formulations will ever be ready to respect those which have given direction to his thinking in the first place; he will not fail to venerate ‘every word that proceedth out of the mouth of God.’ There is a rustic proverb which says that only the pig overturns its trough after emptying it and the same moral is to be found in the well-known fable of the fox and the grapes. If Zen is less given to doctrinal formulation than other schools, this is because its own structure allows it to be so; it owes its consistency to factors that are perfectly rigorous, but not easily grasped from the outside; its silence, charged with mystery, is quite other than a vague and facile mutism. Zen, precisely by reason of its direct and implicit character, which is admirably suited to certain possibilities of the Far Eastern mind, presupposes so many conditions of mentality and environment that the slightest lack in this respect jeopardizes the result of any effort however sincere; at the same time we must not forget that a typical man of the Japenese élite is in many respects a product of Zen. (The Essentials Writings of Frithjof Schuon, p. 217-218). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism