God, being Unity, wishes to unite; infinite, He wishes to realize Union according to all possible modes, or at all DEGREES of the Possible. Wishing to unite, He separates to be able to unite; that is the function of Mâyâ. From this follows the creation of the world and, within the world, the realization of all contrasts; within extension and within duration, beings and destinies. Essays NATURE AND UNITY OF THE PRINCIPLE
Let us come back now to the question of the “pneumatic”, quite apart from any personal application of the term: the quality of the born-gnostic involves not only modes but also DEGREES; there is the difference between the jnãni and the bhakta on the one hand and, on the other, differences of plenitude or breadth in the manifestation of the archetype. In any case, the pneumatic is situated, by his nature, on the vertical and timeless axis – where there is no “before” or “after” – so that the archetype which he personifies or “incarnates”, and which is his true “himself’ or “his very self’ can, at any moment, pierce through the contingent, individual envelope; it is therefore really “himself’ who is speaking. The real gnostic does not attribute any “state” to himself, for he is without ambition and without ostentation; he has a tendency rather – through an “instinct for holding back” – to disguise his nature inasmuch as he has, in any case, awareness of “cosmic play” (lila) and it is hard for him to take secular and worldly persons seriously, that is to say, “horizontal” beings who are full of self-confidence and who remain, “humanists” that they are, below the vocation of man. Essays A NOTE ON RENÉ GUÉNON
Transformist evolutionism offers a patent example of “horizontality” in the domain of the natural sciences, owing to the fact that it puts a biological evolution of “ascending” DEGREES in place of a cosmogonic emanation of “descending” DEGREES. (NA: We understand the term “emanation” in the Platonic sense: the starting point remains transcendent, hence unaffected, whereas in deist or naturalist emanationism the cause pertains to the same ontological order as the effect.) Similarly, modern philosophers – mutatis mutandis – replace metaphysical causality with “physical” and empirical causalities, which no doubt demands intelligence, but one that is purely cerebral. (Roots of the Human Condition, p. 5). sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress
In other words, rationalism does not present itself as a possible – and necessarily relative – development of a traditional and sapiential point of view, but it usurps the function of pure intellectuality. But there are DEGREES to be observed here, as for example with Aristotle: his fundamental ideas – like those of “form” and “matter” (hylomorphism) – really flow from a metaphysical knowledge, and so from supra-mental intuition; they carry in themselves all the universal significance of symbols and become rational – and therefore “abstract” – only to the extent that they become encrusted in a more or less artificial system. sophiaperennis: Modern philosophers
Not only is scientistic philosophy ignorant of the Divine Presences, it ignores their rhythms and their “life”: it ignores, not only the DEGREES of reality and the fact of our imprisonment in the sensory world, but also cycles, the universal solve et coagula; this means that it ignores the gushing forth of our world from an invisible and fulgurant Reality, and its reabsorption into the dark light of this same Reality. All of the Real lies in the Invisible; it is this above all that must be felt or understood before one can speak of knowledge and effectiveness. But this will not be understood, and the human world will continue inexorably on its course. sophiaperennis: Scientistic philosophy
In theology as in philosophy, and to varying DEGREES, one encounters a deliberate way of reasoning in a given manner and in a given direction in order to support a certain axiom, and to exclude from the intelligence all possibilities which do not serve this end. The subjectivists will say that the same holds true for all demonstrations, but this is not so, since in the case of a certitude independent of all sentimental postulates, the arguments result objectively from the certitude to be demonstrated, and not subjectively from our desire to prove it. sophiaperennis: About the rational mode of knowledge
The importance of this idea of the DEGREES of the Real, is linked to the fact that it indicates totality of knowledge. In Hinduism, as is known, this totality is represented by Shankara, whereas for Ramanuja, as for the Semitic exoterisms, the Real does not comprise extinctive DEGREES; among the Greeks , we encounter the awareness of these DEGREES in Platonic idealism, but scarcely so in Aristotelian hylomorphism, which accentuates or favors the “horizontal” perspective; whence its utility for scientism on the one hand, and for a theology more cosmological than metaphysical on the other hand; science being centered upon the world, and religion upon the eschatological interests of man. sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and Aristotle
The cosmological proof of God, which is found in both Aristotle and Plato, and which consists in inferring from the existence of the world that of a transcendent, positive and infinite Cause, finds no greater favor in the eyes of those who deny the supernatural. According to these people the notion of God merely compensates, in this case, for our ignorance of causes, a gratuitous argument, if ever there was one, for the cosmological proof implies, not a purely logical and abstract supposition, hut a profound knowledge of causality. If we know what total causality is, namely the “vertical” and “descending” projection of a possibility through different DEGREES of existence, then we can conceive the First Cause; otherwise we cannot do so. Here again we observe that the objection arises from ignoring what is implicit: rationalists forget that “proof,” on the level in question, is a key or a symbol, a means of drawing back a veil rather than of providing actual illumination; it is not by itself a leap out of ignorance and into knowledge. The principial argument “indicates” rather than “proves”; it cannot be anything more than a guideline or an aide-mémoire, since it is impossible to prove the Absolute outside itself. If “to prove” means to know something by virtue of a particular mental stratagem – but for which one would perforce remain in ignorance – then there are no possible “proofs of God”; and this, moreover, explains why one can do without them in symbolist and contemplative metaphysics. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle
The means of expression of metaphysical knowledge is a dialectic either logical or symbolistic in character, with various DEGREES of accentuation and combination; this is what distinguishes, for example, Vedantism from Taoism, but this question of dialectic or expression cannot separate them or oppose them from the point of view of pure truth, which is their common content. Most rationalists disdain doctrines symbolical in form, but assign the Vedanta or Neoplatonism to their category of “philosophy,” that is to say namely of profane logic, while asserting that these speculations have not succeeded in solving the “great problems” of “the human mind.” Other rationalists, on the contrary, deny these same doctrines along with those symbolical in form on the pretext that they are “dogmatisms” unworthy of “philosophy.” sophiaperennis: Rationalism
Certainly the artist does not fashion his work with the sole intention of producing a spiritually or psychologically useful object; he also produces it for the joy of creating by imitating, and of imitating by creating, that is to say, for the joy of elucidating the existential intention of the model, or in other words, of extracting from the latter its very quintessence; at least this is so in some cases, which it would be pretentious and out of proportion to generalize. In other cases, on the contrary, the work of the artist is an extinction through love, the artist dying, so to speak, in creating: he performs an act of union by identifying himself with the admired or beloved object, by recreating it according to the music of his own soul. In other cases again – and all these modes may or must combine with one another to different DEGREES – the artist is fired by the desire to adapt the object to a given material or a given technique: the Japanese engravers confer on Fuji and other views a quality that makes one think of the wood that they use, and the painters of screens present rivers and the moon against a gilded background which enhances them by giving them in addition a paradisal perfume. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART
Music distinguishes essences as such and does not, like poetry, distinguish their DEGREES of manifestation. Music can express the quality of ‘fire’ without being able to specify – since it is not objective – whether it is question of visible fire, of passion, of fervour or the flame of mystic love, or of the universal fire – of angelic essence – from which all these expressions are derived. Music expresses all this at one and the same time when it gives voice to the spirit of fire, and it is for this reason that some hear the voice of passion and others the corresponding spiritual function angelic or Divine. Music is capable of presenting countless combinations and modes of these essences by means of secondary differentiations and characteristics of melody and rhythm. It should be added that rhythm is more essential than melody, since it represents the principial or masculine determination of musical language, whereas melody is its expansive and feminine substance. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
One of the effects of modern science has been to give religion a mortal wound, by posing in concrete terms problems which only esoterism can resolve; but these problems remain unresolved, because esoterism is not listened to, and is listened to less now than ever. Faced by these new problems, religion is disarmed, and it borrows clumsily and gropingly the arguments of the enemy; it is thus compelled to falsify by imperceptible DEGREES its own perspective, and more and more to disavow itself. Its doctrine, it is true, is not affected, but the false opinion borrowed from its repudiators corrode it cunningly “from within”; witness, for example, modernist exegesis, the demagogic leveling down of the liturgy, the Darwinism of Teilhard de Chardin, the “worker-priests”, and a “sacred art” obedient to surrealist and “abstract” influences. Scientific discoveries prove nothing to contradict the traditional positions of religion, of course, but there is no one at hand to point this out; too many “believers” consider, on the contrary, that it is time that religion “shook off the dust of the centuries”, which amounts to saying, that it should “liberate” itself from its very essence and from everything which manifests that essence. sophiaperennis: Science and religious Faith
According to the observations of experimental science, the blue sky which stretches above us is not a world of bliss, but an optical illusion due to the refraction of light by the atmosphere, and from this point of view, it is obviously right to maintain that the home of the blessed does not lie up there. Nevertheless it would be a great mistake to assert that the association of ideas between the visible heaven and celestial Paradise does not arise from the nature of things, but rather from ignorance and ingenuousness mixed with imagination and sentimentality; for the blue sky is a direct and therefore adequate symbol of the higher and supra-sensory DEGREES of Existence; it is indeed a distant reverberation of those DEGREES, and it is necessarily so since it is truly a symbol, consecrated by the sacred Scriptures and by the unanimous intuition of peoples. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations
One of the effects of modern science has been to give religion a mortal wound, by posing in concrete terms problems which only esoterism can resolve; but these problems remain unresolved, because esoterism. is not listened to, and is listened to less now than ever. Faced by these new problems, religion is disarmed, and it borrows clumsily and gropingly the arguments of the enemy; it is thus compelled to falsify by imperceptible DEGREES its own perspective, and more and more to disavow itself. Its doctrine, it is true, is not affected, but the false opinions borrowed from its repudiators corrode it cunningly “from within”; witness, for example, modernist exegesis, the demagogic leveling down of the liturgy, the Darwinism of Teilhard de Chardin, the “worker-priests”, and a “sacred art” obedient to surrealist and “abstract” influences. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations
For the same reasons it also denies Revelation, which alone rebuilds the bridge broken by the fall. According to the observations of experimental science, the blue sky which stretches above us is not a world of bliss, but an optical illusion due to the refraction of light by the atmosphere, and from this point of view, it is obviously right to maintain that the home of the blessed does not lie up there. Nevertheless it would be a great mistake to assert that the association of ideas between the visible heaven and celestial Paradise does not arise from the nature of things, but rather from ignorance and ingenuousness, mixed with imagination and sentimentality; for the blue sky is a direct and therefore adequate symbol of the higher and supra-sensory DEGREES of Existence; it is indeed a distant reverberation of those DEGREES, and it is necessarily so since it is truly a symbol, consecrated by the sacred Scriptures and by the unanimous intuition of peoples. (NA: The word “symbol” implies “participation” or “aspect”, whatever the difference of level may be involved.) sophiaperennis: Science and negation of Transcendence