The content of the universal and primordial Doctrine is the following, expressed in Vedantic terms: “Brahma is Reality; the world is appearance; the soul is not other than Brahma.” These are the three great theses of integral metaphysics; one positive, one negative, one unitive. Let us specify that in the second affirmation, it is important to understand that “appearance” gives rise to two complementary interpretations: according to the first, the world is illusion, nothingness; according to the second, it is DIVINE Manifestation; the first point of view is upheld by Shankara and Shivaism, and the second by Ramanuja and Vishnuism; roughly speaking, for there are compensations in both camps. The third of the fundamental affirmations in a way marks the passage from the “Truth” to the “Path,” or let us say from the Doctrine to the Method; the soul not being “other than Brahma,” its vocation is to transcend the world. In other words, since the human intellect has by definition the capacity to conceive and to realize the Absolute, this possibility is its Law; from speculative discernment results operative and unitive concentration. To theology is joined orison; “pray without ceasing.” Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy
What we blame in those who are contemptuous of “metaphysical ratiocination” and the “subject-object opposition” is not so much a given perspective as the exaggeration resulting from it or nourished by it. Excess is in the nature of man; pious exaggeration is inevitable on the whole, as is the sectarian mentality. We do not remember who said “all that is excessive is insignificant”; this is quite true, but let us not lose sight of the fact that on the religious plane, hyperbole veils an intention that in the end is merciful; it is then a question of upâya, of a “saving stratagem”. Doubtless, the voices of wisdom that esoterically either condemn or justify “holy absurdities” may appear “heretical” from the standpoint of a given literalistic orthodoxy, but “God knoweth His own”; the DIVINE Intellect is not limited by a given theology or a given morality. According to the norm, that which is true saves; according to Grace, that which saves is true. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy
To say Beauty is to say Love; and it is known how important this idea of Love is in all religions and all spiritual alchemies. The reason for this is that Love is the tendency towards Union: this tendency can be a movement, either towards the Immutable, the Absolute, or towards the Limitless, the Infinite; on the plane of human relations, a particular love is the support for Love as such; and the love of man for woman can be compared to the liberating tendency towards the DIVINE Infinitude — woman personifying All-Possibility — whereas the love of woman for man is comparable to the stabilizing tendency towards the DIVINE Center, which offers all certitude and all security; however, each partner participates in the other’s position, given that each is a human being and that in this respect the sexual scission is secondary. As regards sexuality in itself, the Sufi Ibn Arabi deems sexual union to be, in the natural order, the most adequate image of Supreme Knowledge: of Extinction in Allâh of the “Knower through Allâh.” Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy
In the Buddhist as well as the Hindu climate, one encounters a mystical altruism that protests against “seeking a selfish salvation”: one should not wish to save oneself, it seems, one should at the same time wish to save others, indeed everyone, at least according to one’s intention. Now a selfish salvation is a contradiction in terms; an egoist does not obtain salvation, there is no place in Heaven for the miser. Altruists do not see that in the Path, the distinction between “I” and “others” disappears: any salvatory realization is so to speak realization as such, and this being so, a realization obtained by a given person always has an invisible radiance that blesses the ambience. There is no need for a sentimentalism that intends to come to the rescue of Truth; for with Truth, Love is already given, the circle closes with a transpersonal and infinitely generous Beatitude. Love of the Creator implies Love of creatures; and true charity implies Love of God — of DIVINE Reality, whatever be its Name. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy
In reality, gnosis is essentially the path of the intellect and hence of intellection; the driving force of this path is above all intelligence, and not will and sentiment as is the case in the Semitic monotheistic mysticisms, including average Sufism. Gnosis is characterized by its recourse to pure metaphysics: the distinction between Atma and Maya and the consciousness of the potential identity between the human subject, jivatma, and the DIVINE Subject, Paramatma. The path comprises on the one hand “comprehension,” and on the other “concentration”; hence doctrine and method. The modalities of the latter are quite diverse: in particular, there is on the one hand the mantra, the evocative and transforming formula, and on the other hand, the yantra, the visual symbol. The path is the passage from potentiality to virtuality, and from virtuality to actuality, its summit being the state of the one “delivered in this life,” the jivan-mukta. sophiaperennis: Gnosis
It is true that the word “illumination” can have a superior meaning, in which case it no longer designates a passive phenomenon; unitive and liberating illumination is beyond the distinction between passivity and activity. Or more exactly, illumination is the DIVINE Activity in us, but for that very reason it also possesses an aspect of supreme Passivity in the sense that it coincides with the “extinction” of the passional and dark elements separating man from his immanent DIVINE Essence; this extinction constitutes receptivity to the Influx of Heaven – without losing sight of the fact that the DIVINE Order comprises a “Passive Perfection” as well as an “Active Perfection,” and that the human spirit must in the final analysis participate in both mysteries. sophiaperennis: Gnosis
In gnosis, there is first of all the intellective knowledge of the Absolute – not merely of the “personal God” – and then self-knowledge; for one cannot know the DIVINE Order without knowing oneself. “Know thyself,” says the inscription over the portal of the initiatory temple at Delphi; and “the Kingdom of God is within you.” sophiaperennis: Gnosis
Much could be said about the operations and modalities of DIVINE Omnipotence. In the case of miracles, God projects something of Himself into the world and modifies the natural course of things by His Presence. In other cases, which properly speaking do not fall outside the natural course of things, the DIVINE Presence is less direct or, if one prefers, more indirect, for the entry of God into the world cannot mean that the DIVINE Presence enters the world with its very substance, which would reduce the world to ashes. This amounts to saying that in the sphere of the manifestations of DIVINE Power, one has to distinguish between “horizontal” and “vertical” dimensions, the vertical being supernatural and the horizontal natural; for the materialists, only the horizontal dimension exists, and that is why they cannot conceive of causes which operate vertically and which for that very reason are non-existent for them, like the vertical dimension itself. (1) (Survey of Metaphysics and esoterism, 68-69). sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress
It will be objected that there is no proof of this, to which we reply – aside from the phenomenon of subjectivity which precisely comprises this proof, leaving aside other possible intellectual proofs, not needed by Intellection – to which we reply then, that there are infinitely fewer proofs for this inconceivable absurdity, evolutionism, which has the miracle of consciousness springing from a heap of earth or pebbles, metaphorically speaking. (From the DIVINE to the Human, p. 5-6). sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress
If the evolutionists are right, the human phenomenon is inexplicable and human life is not worth living. Moreover it is to theses conclusions that they arrive in the end, whence their axiom of the absurdity of existence; this is to say that they attribute to the object, which is inaccessible to them, the absurdity of the subject, which they have deliberately chosen by following the propensity towards not innocent, but human, animality. (From the DIVINE to the Human, p. 17). sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress
In reality, the evolutionist hypothesis is unnecessary because the creationist concept is so as well; for the creature appears on earth, not by falling from heaven, but by progressively passing – starting from the archetype – from the subtle to the material world, materialization being brought about within a kind of visible aura quite comparable to the “spheres of light” which, according to many accounts, introduce and terminate celestial apparitions. (From the DIVINE to the Human, p. 88) sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress
The ape, for example, is there to show what man is and what he is not, and certainly not to show what he has been; far from being able to be a virtual form of man, the ape incarnates an animal desire to be human, hence a desire of imitation and usurpation; but he finds itself as if before a closed door and falls back all the more heavily into its animality, the perfect innocence of which, it can no longer recapture, if one may make use of such a metaphor; it is as if the animal, prior to the creation of man and to protest against it, had wished to anticipate it, which evokes the refusal of Lucifer to prostrate before Adam. (From the DIVINE to the Human, p. 98) sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress
If man is a hypocrite, two options lie before us: either he is basically such, and then it would be impossible to remark the fact without going outside human nature by miraculous or DIVINE means; or else man is only accidentally and relatively hypocritical, in which case there was no need to wait for psychoanalysis to take account of the fact, since health is more fundamental to the nature of man than illness, and there have therefore always been men who could recognize evil and who knew the cure for it. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress
In short: we reject rationalism not because of its possibly plausible criticisms of humanized religion, but because of its negation of the divine kernel of the phenomenon of religion; a negation that essentially implies the negation of intellectual intuition, thus of that immanent DIVINE Presence which is the Intellect. The basic error of systematized rationality – by the way, it is wrong to attribute this ideology to the great Greeks – is to put fallible reasoning in place of infallible intellection; as if the rational faculty were the whole of Intelligence and even the only Intelligence. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism
To sum up our exposition and at the risk of repeating ourselves, we say that all anti-intellectual philosophy falls into this trap: it claims, for example, that there is only the subjective and the relative, without taking account of the fact that this is an assertion which, as such, is valid only on condition that it is itself neither subjective nor relative, for otherwise there would no longer be any difference between correct perception and illusion, or between truth and error. If “everything is true that is subjective,” then Lapland is in France, provided we imagine it so; and if everything is relative – in a sense which excludes all reflection of absoluteness in the world – then the definition of relativity is equally relative, absolutely relative, and our definition has no meaning. Relativists of all kinds – the “existentialist” and “vitalist” defenders of the infra-rational – have then no excuse for their bad habits of thought. Those who would dig a grave for the intelligence22 do not escape this fatal contradiction: they reject intellectual dis crimination as being “rationalism” and in favor of “existence” or of “life,” without realizing that this rejection is not “existence” or “life” but a “rationalist” operation in its turn, hence something considered to be opposed to the idol “life” or “existence”; for if rationalism – or let us say intelligence – is opposed, as these philosophers believe, to fair and innocent “existence” – that of vipers and bombs among other things – then there is no means of either defending or accusing this existence, nor even of defining it in any way at all, since all thinking is supposed to “go outside” existence in order to place itself on the side of rationalism, as if one could cease to exist in order to think. In reality, man – insofar as he is distinct from other creatures on earth – is intelligence; and intelligence – in its principle and its plenitude – is knowledge of the Absolute; the Absolute is the fundamental content of the intelligence and determines its nature and functions. What distinguishes man from animals is not knowledge of a tree, but the concept – whether explicit or implicit – of the Absolute; it is from this that the whole hierarchy of values is derived, and hence all notion of a homogeneous world. God is the “motionless mover” of every operation of the mind, even when man – reason – makes himself out to be the measure of God. To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the Absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence; nothing is fully human that is not determined by the DIVINE, and therefore centered on it. Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the DIVINE, the human collapses. In our day, it is the machine which tends to become the measure of man, and thereby it becomes something like the measure of God, though of course in a diabolically illusory manner; for the most “advanced” minds it is in fact the machine, technics, experimental science, which will henceforth dictate to man his nature, and it is these which create the truth – as is shamelessly admitted – or rather what usurps its place in man’s consciousness. It is difficult for man to fall lower, to realize a greater mental perversion, a more complete abandonment of himself, a more perfect betrayal of his intelligent and free personality: in the name of “science” and of “human genius” man consents to become the creation of what he has created and to forget what he is, to the point of expecting the answer to this from machines and from the blind forces of nature; he has waited until he is no longer anything and now claims to be his own creator. Swept away by a torrent, he glories in his incapacity to resist it. sophiaperennis: Existentialism
There is a common mistake, and one characteristic of the positivist or existentialist mentality of our times, which consists in believing that the establishing of a fact depends on knowing its causes or the remedies for it as the case may be, as if man had not a right to see things he can neither explain nor modify; to point out an evil is called “barren criticism” and one forgets that the first step towards a possible cure is to establish the nature of the disease. In any case, every situation offers the possibility, if not of an objective solution, at least of a subjective evaluation, a liberation by the spirit; whoever understands the real nature of machinery will at the same time escape from psychological enslavement to machines, and this is already a great gain. We say this without any optimism and without losing sight of the fact that the present world is a necessary evil whose metaphysical root lies in the last analysis in the infinity of DIVINE Possibility. sophiaperennis: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Klages and others like them.
If truth is thus made to embrace ontological reality, aseity, the inxpressible, and so also the “personal” realization of the DIVINE, there is clearly no “total truth” on the plane of thought; but if by “truth” is understood thought insofar as it is an adequate reflection, on the intellectual plane, of “being,” there is a “total truth” on this plane, but on condition firstly that nothing quantitative is envisaged in this totality, and secondly that it is made clear that this totality can have a relative sense, according to the order of thought to which it belongs. sophiaperennis: What is the intellect and Intellection?
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
Plato is sometimes included under the heading of rationalism, which is unjust despite the rationalistic style of his dialectic and a manner of thinking that is too geometrical; but what puts Plato in the clearest possible opposition to rationalism properly so-called is his doctrine of the eve of the soul. (NA: The opinion linking Plato not only with Pythagoreanism but also with the Egyptian tradition is perhaps not to be disregarded; in that case, the wisdom of Thoth will have survived in alchemy and partially or indirectly in Neo- Platonism as well, within Islam no less than in Christianity and Judaism.) This eye, so he teaches, lies buried in a slough from which it must extricate itself in order to mount to the vision of real things, namely the archetypes. Plato doubtless here has in mind an initiatic regeneration, for he says that the eyes of the soul in the case of the ordinary man are not strong enough to bear the vision of the DIVINE; moreover, this mysterial background helps to explain the somewhat playful character of the Platonic dialogues, since we are most probably dealing here with an intentional dialectical exoterism destined to adapt sacred teachings for a promulgation which had become desirable at that time. sophiaperennis: Plato
Plato has been reproached for having had too negative an idea of matter, but this is to forget that in this connection there are in Plato’s thought (NA: By “thought” we mean here, not an artificial elaboration but the mental crystallization of real knowledge. With all due deference to anti-Platonic theologians, Platonism is not true because it is logical, it is logical because it is true; and as for the possible or apparent illogicalities of the theologies, these can be explained not by an alleged right to the mysteries of absurdity, but by the fragment ary character of particular dogmatic positions and also by the insuffi ciency of the means of thought and expression. We may recall in this connection the alternativism and the sublimism proper to the Semitic mentality, as well as the absence of the crucial notion of Maya -. at least at the ordinary theological level, meaning by this reservation that the boundaries of theology are not strictly delimited.) two movements: the first refers to fallen matter, and the second to matter in itself and as a support for the spirit. For matter, like the animic substance that precedes it, is a reflection of Maya: consequently it comprises a deiform and ascending aspect and a deifugal and descending aspect; and just as there occurred the fall of Lucifer – without which there would not have been a serpent in the Earthly Paradise – so also there occurred the fall of man. For Plato, matter – or the sensible world – is bad in so far as it is opposed to spirit, and in this respect only; and it does in fact oppose the spirit – or the world of Ideas – by its hardened and compressive nature, which is heavy as well as dividing, without forgetting its corruptibility in connection with life. But matter is good with respect to the inherence in it of the world of Ideas: the cosmos, including its material limit, is the manifestation of the Sovereign Good, and matter demonstrates this by its quality of stability, by the purity and nobility of certain of its modes, and by its symbolist plasticity, in short by its inviolable capacity to serve as a receptacle for influences from Heaven. A distant reflection of universal Maya, matter is as it were a prolongation of the Throne of God, a truth that a ”spirituality” obsessed by the cursing of the earth has too readily lost sight of, at the price of a prodigious impoverishment and a dangerous disequilibrium; and yet this same spirituality was aware of the principial and virtual sanctity of the body, which a priori is “image of God” and a posteriori an element of “glory”. But the fullest refutation of all Manicheism is provided by the body of the Avatara, which is capable in principle of ascending to Heaven – by ”transfiguration” – without having to pass through that effect of the “forbidden fruit” which is death, and which shows by its sacred character that matter is fundamentally a projection of the Spirit. (NA: The “Night Journey” (isra, mi ‘raj) of the Prophet has the same significance.) Like every contingent substance, matter is a mode of radiation of the DIVINE Substance; a partially corruptible mode, indeed, as regards the existential level, but inviolable in its essence. (NA: All the same, the biblical narrative regarding the creation of the material world implies symbolically the description of the whole cosmogony, and so that of all the worlds, and even that of the eternal archetypes of the cosmos; traditional exegesis, especially that of the Kabbalists bears witness to this.) sophiaperennis: Plato
Platonic recollection is none other than the participation of the human Intellect in the ontological insights of the DIVINE Intellect; this is why the Sufi is said to be ‘arif bi-‘Llah, “knower by Allah”, in keeping with the teaching of a famous hadith according to which God is the “Eye wherewith he (the Sufi) seeth”; and this explains the nature of the “Eye of Knowledge”, or of the “Eye of the Heart”. sophiaperennis: Plato
It has been said and said again that the Hellenists and the Orientals – the “Platonic” spirits in the widest sense – have become blameworthy in “arrogantly” rejecting Christ, or that they are trying to escape from their “responsibilities”- once again and always ! – as creatures towards the Creator in withdrawing into their own centre where they claim to find, in their pure being, the essence of things and the DIVINE Reality; they thus dilute, it seems, the quality of creature and at the same time t hat of Creator with a sort of pantheistic impersonalism, which amounts to saying that they destroy the relationship of “obligation” between the Creator and the creature. In reality “responsibilities” are relative as we ourselves are relative in our existential specification; they cannot be less relative – or “more absolute”- than the subject to which they are related. One who, by the grace of Heaven, succeeds in escaping from the tyranny of the ego is by that very circumstance discharged from the responsibilities which the ego implies. God shows himself as creative Person in so far as – or in relation to the fact that – we are “creature” and individual, but that particular reciprocal relationship is far from exhausting all our ontological and intellectual nature; that is to say, our nature cannot be exhaustively defined by notions of “duty”, of “rights”, nor by other fixations of the kind. It has been said that the “rejection” of the Christie gift on the part of the “Platonic” spirit constitutes the subtlest and most Luciferan perversity of the intelligence; this argument, born of an instinct of selfpreservation, wrong in its inspiration but comprehensible on its own plane, can easily and far more pertinently be turned against those who make use of it: for, if we are to be obliged at all costs to find some mental perversion somewhere, we shall find it with those who want to substitute for the Absolute a personal and therefore relative God, and temporal phenomena for metaphysical principles, and that not in connection with a childlike faith that asks nothing of anybody, but within the framework of the most exacting erudition and the most totalitarian intellectual pretension. If there is such a thing as abuse of the intelligence, it is to be found in the substitution of the relative for the Absolute, or the accident from the Substance, on the pretext of putting the “concrete” above the “abstract”; it is not to be found in the rejection – in the name of transcendent and immutable principles – of a relativity presented as absoluteness. The misunderstanding between Christians and Hellenists can for the greater part be condensed to a false alternative: in effect, the fact that God resides in our deepest “being”- or at the extreme transpersonal depth of our consciousness – and that we can in principle realize him with the help of the pure and theomorphic intellect, in no way excludes the equal and simultaneous affirmation of this immanent and impersonal Divinity as objective and personal, nor the fact that we can do nothing without his grace, despite the essentially “divine” character of the Intellect in which we participate naturally and supernaturally. sophiaperennis: Platonism and Christianity
Certain arguments against eternal life are thoroughly typical of the “concretist” perversion of the intelligence and the imagination: to exist, they say, is to measure oneself against limits; it is to conquer resistances and to produce something. They have evidently no conception of the possibility of an existence that is incorporated in active Immutability, or in immutable Activity and that lives by it; the touchstone of the real for the materialists is always gross experience coupled with the “hylic’s” lack of imagination; on this level of thought there is nothing but “boredom” to be seen in eternal life, which brings us to the monologue attributed metaphorically by Kant to the DIVINE Person who, in taking note of his eternity, would, so it is supposed, logically be obliged to raise the question of his own origin. sophiaperennis: Kantianism
There remains the experimental or mystical proof of God. While admitting that logically and in the absence of a doctrine, it proves nothing to anyone who has not undergone the unitive experience, nonetheless there is no justification for concluding that because it is incommunicable it must be false; this was the error of Kant, who moreover gave the name of “theurgy” to this direct experience of the DIVINE Substance. sophiaperennis: Kantianism
In every case of a contact between the DIVINE and the terrestrial we see this fluctuation between the metaphysical perspective of essential – not “material” – identity and the cosmological perspective of analogy or of symbolical parallelism, hence of difference. This contact between the DIVINE and the human is, by reason of its very elusiveness, a mystery, and even the mystery par excellence, for we touch God “everywhere and nowhere,” as Pascal would say. God is quite close to us, infinitely close, but we are far from Him; He is incarnate in a given symbol, but we risk grasping only the husk, retaining only the shadow. Idolatry, which divinizes the shadow as such, and atheism, which denies God by reason of His intangibility – but it is we who are “absent,” not God – reduce to absurdity the two aspects of symbolism: identity, which is unitive, and analogy, which is separative, but parallel. sophiaperennis: Pascal
As regards sacred art, it must be said that painted and sculpted images also have God as their author since it is He who reveals and creates them through man; He offers the image of Himself by humanizing it, for if man is “made in God’s image,” it is because God is the prototype of the human image. If virgin Nature is the image of God, then man, who is situated at the center of this Nature is so as well; on the one hand, he is witness to the DIVINE image that surrounds him, and on the other hand, he is himself this image when God, in sacred art, takes on the form of man. sophiaperennis: ART, ITS DUTIES AND ITS RIGHTS
The DIVINE Principle is the Absolute and, being absolute, it is the Infinite; it is from Infinity that manifesting or creating Maya arises; and this Manifestation realizes a third hypostatic quality, namely Perfection. Absoluteness, Infinity, Perfection; and consequently beauty, in so far as it is a manifestation, demands perfection, and perfection is realized on the one hand in terms of absoluteness and on the other hand in terms of infinity: in reflecting the Absolute, beauty realizes a mode of regularity, and in reflecting the Infinite, it realizes a mode of mystery. Beauty, being perfection, is regularity and mystery; it is through these two qualities that it stimulates and at the same time appeases the intelligence and also a sensibility which is in conformity with the intelligence. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS
Absolute, Infinite, Perfection: the first could be represented by a point, the second by the radii extending from it, and the third by the circle. Perfection is the Absolute projected, by virtue of Infinitude, into relativity; it is by definition adequate, but it is not the Absolute, or in other words, it is a kind of Absolute – namely, the manifested Absolute – but not the Absolute as such; and by “manifested Absolute” one must always understand: manifested in such and such a way. The Infinite is DIVINE Femininity, and it is from it that Manifestation proceeds; in the Infinite, Beauty is essential, and so formless, undifferentiated and unarticulated, whereas in and through Manifestation it coagulates and becomes tangible, not only because of the very fact of exteriorization, but also, and positively, by virtue of its content, image of the Absolute and factor of necessity, and so of regularity. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS
“God is beautiful and He loves beauty”, says a hadith which we have quoted more than once: (NA: Another hadith reminds us that ” the heart of the believer is sweet, and it loves sweetness (halawah)”. The “sweet”, according to the Arabic word, is at the same time the pleasing, coupled with a nuance of spring-like beauty; which amounts to saying that the heart of the believer is fundament ally benevolent becaus e having conquered the hardness that goes with egoism and worldliness, he is made of sweetness or generous beauty.) Atma is not only Sat and Chit, “Being” and ”Consciousness” – or more relatively: “Power” and “Omniscience” – but also Ananda, “Beatitude”, and thus Beauty and Goodness; (NA: When the Koran says that God “has prescribed for Himsel f Mercy (Rahmah)”, it affirms that Mercy pertains to the very Essence of God; moreover, the notion of Mercy does not do justice, except in a partial and extrinsic way, to the beati fic nature of the Infinite.) and what we want to know and realize, we must a priori mirror in our own being, because in the domain of positive realities (NA: This reservation means that we do not know privative realities – which, precisely, manifest unreality – except by contrast; for example, the soul understands moral ugliness to the extent that it itself is morally beautiful, and it cannot be beauti ful except by participation in DIVINE Beauty, Beauty in itself.) we can only know perfectly what we are. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS
The dilemma of moralists enclosed within a “black or white” alternative is resolved metaphysically by the complementarity between transcendence and immanence: according to the first perspective nothing is really beautiful because God alone is Beauty; according to the second, every beauty is really beautiful because it is that of God. Consequently every beauty is both a closed door and an open door, or in other words, an obstacle and a vehicle: either beauty separates us from God because it is entirely identified in our mind with its earthly support which then assumes the role of idol, or beauty brings us close to God because we perceive in it the vibrations of Beatitude and Infinity which emanate from DIVINE Beauty. (NA: Ramakrishna, when he saw a flight of cranes, a lion, a dancing-girl, used to fall into ecstasy. This is what is called “seeing God everywhere”; not by deciphering the symbolisms, of course, but by perceiving the essences.) sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS
Within the framework of a traditional civilization, there is without doubt a distinction to be made between sacred art and profane art. The purpose of the first is to communicate, on the one hand, spiritual truths and, on the other hand, a celestial presence; sacerdotal art has in principle a truly sacramental function. The function of profane art is obviously more modest: it consists in providing what theologians call “sensible consolations”, with a view to an equilibrium conducive to the spiritual life, rather in the manner of the flowers and birds in a garden. The purpose of art of every kind – and this includes craftsmanship – is to create a climate and forge a mentality; it thus rejoins, directly or indirectly, the function of interiorizing contemplation, the Hindu darshan: contemplation of a holy man, of a sacred place, of a venerable object, of a DIVINE image. (NA: When one compares the blustering and heavily carnal paintings of a Rubens with noble, correct and profound works such as the profile of Giovanna Tornabuoni by Ghirlandaio or the screens with plum-trees by Korin, one may wonder whether the term ” profane art” can serve as a common denominator for productions that are so fundamentally different. In the case of noble works impregnated with contemplative spirit one would prefer to speak of ” extra-liturgical art”, without having to specify whether it is profane or not, or to what extent it is. Moreover one must distinguish between normal profane art and a profane art which is deviated and which has thereby ceased to be a term of comparison.) sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART
The archetype of beauty, or its DIVINE model, is the superabundance and equilibrium of the DIVINE qualities, and at the same time the overflowing of the existential potentialities in pure Being. In a rather different sense, beauty stems from the DIVINE Love, this Love being the will to deploy itself and to give itself, to realize itself in “another”; thus it is that “God created the world by love.” The resultant of Love is a totality that realizes a perfect equilibrium and a perfect beatitude and is for that reason a manifestation of beauty, the first of such manifestations in which all others are contained, namely, the Creation, or the world which in its disequilibriums contains ugliness, but is beauty in its totality. This totality the human soul does not realize, save in holiness. (NA: It is said that the Buddhas save as well by their radiant beauty as by other upâyas; now the Buddha or the Avatâra synthesizes in his person the entire universe, consequently the beauty of the macrocosm is his.) sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty
Thus beauty always manifests a reality of love, of deployment, of illimitation, of equilibrium, of beatitude, of generosity. On the one hand, love, which is subjective, responds to beauty, which is objective, and on the other hand, beauty, which is deployment, springs from love, which is illimitation, a giving of self, an overflowing, and thus realizes a sort of infinitude. In Being the Universal Substance, the materia prima, is pure Beauty; the creative Essence, which communicates to Substance the archetypes to be incarnated, is the DIVINE Intelligence, of which Beauty is the eternal complement. (NA: This is the complementarism Purusha-Prakriti, the two poles of Ishvara, Being.) sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty
To speak of “interior Beauty” is not a contradiction in terms. It means that the accent is placed on the existential and contemplative aspect of the virtues and at the same time on their metaphysical transparency; it underlines their attachment to their DIVINE Source, which by reverberation invests them with the quality of being an “end in themselves,” or of majesty; and it is because the beautiful has this quality that it relaxes and liberates. Beauty is inferior to goodness as the outward is inferior to the inward, but it is superior to goodness as “being” is superior to “doing,” or as contemplation is superior to action; it is in this sense that the Beauty of God appears as a mystery even more profound than His Mercy. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty
The monks of the eighth century, very different from those religious authorities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who betrayed Christian art by abandoning it to the impure passions of worldly men and the ignorant imagination of the profane, were fully conscious of the holiness of every kind of means able to express the Tradition. They stipulated, at the second council of Nicaea, that ‘art’ (i.e. ‘the perfection of work’) alone belongs to the painter, while ordinance (the choice of the subject) and disposition (the treatment of the subject from the symbolical as well as the technical or material points of view) belongs to the Fathers. (Non est pictoris – ejus enim sola ars est-rerum ordinatio et dispositio Patrum nostrorum.) This amounts to placing all artistic initiative under the direct and active authority of the spiritual leaders of Christianity. Such being the case, how can one explain the fact that during recent centuries, religious circles have for the most part shown such a regret table lack of understanding in respect of all those things which, having an artistic character, are, as they fondly believe, only external matters? First of all, admitting a priori the elimination of every esoteric influence, there is the fact that a religious perspective as such has a tendency to identify itself with the moral point of view, which stresses merit only and believes it is neces sary to ignore the sanctifying quality of intellectual knowledge and, as a result, the value of the supports of such knowledge; now, the perfection of sensible forms is no more ‘meritorious in the moral sense than the intellections which those forms reflect and transmit, and it is therefore only logical that symbolic forms, when they are no longer understood, should be relegated to the background, and even forsaken, in order to be replaced by forms which will no longer appeal to the intelligence, but only to a sentimental imagination capable of inspiring the meritorious act – at least such is the belief of the man of limited intelligence. However, this sort of speculative provocation of reactions by resorting to means of a superficial and vulgar nature will, in the last analysis, prove to be illusory, for, in reality, nothing can be better fitted to influence the deeper dispositions of the soul than sacred art. Profane art, on the contrary, even if it be of some psychological value in the case of souls of inferior intelligence, soon exhausts its means, by the very fact of their superficiality and vulgarity, after which it can only provoke reactions of contempt; these are only too common, and may be considered as a ‘rebound’ of the contempt in which sacred art was held by profane art, especially in its earlier stages. (NA: In the same way, the hostility of the representatives of exotericism for all that lies beyond their comprehension results in an increasingly ‘massive’ exotericism which cannot but suffer from ‘rifts’; but the ‘spiritual porousness’ of Tradition – that is to say the immanence in the ‘substance’ of exotericism of a transcendent ‘dimension’ which makes up for its ‘massiveness,’- this state of ‘porousness’ having been lost, the above-mentioned ‘rifts’ could only be produced from below; which means the replacement of the masters of medieval esotericism by the protagonists of modern unbelief.) It has been a matter of current experience that nothing is able to offer to irreligion a more immediately tangible nourishment than the insipid hypocrisy of religious images; that which was meant to stimulate piety in the believer, but serves to confirm unbelievers in their impiety, whereas it must be recognized that genuinely sacred art does not possess this character of a ‘two-edged weapon’, for being itself more abstract, it offers less hold to hostile psychological reactions. Now, no matter what may be the theories that attribute to the people the need for unintelligent images, warped in their essence, the elites do exist and certainly require something different; what they demand is an art corresponding to their own spirit and in which their soul can come to rest, finding itself again in order to mount to the DIVINE. Such an art cannot spring simply from profane taste, nor even from ‘genius’, but must proceed essentially out of Tradition; this fact being admitted, the masterpiece must be executed by a sanctified artist or, let us say, by one in a state of grace’. (NA: The icon-painters were monks who, before setting to work, prepared themselves by fasting, prayer, confession and communion; it even happened that the colours were mixed with holy water and the dust from relics, as would not have been possible had the icon not possessed a really sacramental character.) Far from serving only for the more or less superficial instruction and edification of the masses, the icon, as is the case with the Hindu yantra and all other visible symbols, establishes a bridge from the sensible to the spiritual: ‘By the visible aspect’, states St. John Damascenus, ‘our thoughts must be drawn up in a spiritual flight and rise to the invisible majesty of God.’ sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART
But let us return to the errors of naturalism. Art, as soon as it is no longer determined, illuminated and guided by spirituality, lies at the mercy of the individual and purely psychical resources of the artist, and these resources must soon run out, if only because of the very platitude of the naturalistic principle which calls only for a superficial tracing of Nature. Reaching the dead-point of its own platitude, naturalism inevitably engendered the monstrosities of ‘surrealism’, The latter is but the decomposing body of an art, and in any case should rather be called ‘infra-realism’; it is properly speaking the satanic consequence of naturalistic luciferianism. Naturalism, as a matter of fact, is clearly luciferian in its wish to imitate the creations of God, not to mention its affirmation of the psychical element to the detriment of the spiritual, of the individual to the detriment of the universal, of the bare fact to the detriment of the symbol. Normally, man must imitate the creative act, not the thing created; that is what is done by symbolic art, and the results are ‘creations’ which are not would-be duplications of those of God, but rather a reflection of them according to a real analogy, revealing the transcendental aspects of things; and this revelation is the only sufficient reason of art, apart from any practical uses such and such objects may serve. There is here a metaphysical inversion of relation which we have already pointed out: for God, His creature is a reflection or an ‘exteriorized’ aspect of Himself; for the artist, on the contrary, the work is a reflection of an inner reality of which he himself is only an outward aspect; God creates His own image, while man, so to speak, fashions his own essence, at least symbolically. On the principial plane, the inner manifests the outer, but on the manifested plane, the outer fashions the inner, and a sufficient reason for all traditional art, no matter of what kind, is the fact that in a certain sense the work is greater than the artist himself and brings back the latter, through the mystery of artistic creation, to the proximity of his own DIVINE Essence. (NA: This explains the danger, so far as Semitic peoples are concerned, that lies in the painting and especially in the carving of living things. Where the Hindu and the inhabitant of the Far East adores a DIVINE reality through a symbol – and we know that a symbol is truly what it symbolizes as far as its essential reality is concerned – the Semite will display a tendency to deify the symbol itself; one of the reasons for the prohibition of plastic and pictorial arts amongst the Semitic peoples was certainly a wish to prevent naturalistic deviations, a very real danger among men whose mentality demanded a Tradition religious in form.) sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART
Ignorant and profane aestheticism, at least in practice, puts the beautiful – or what its sentimental idealism takes to be the beautiful – above the true, and in so doing exposes itself to errors on its own level. But if aestheticism is the unintelligent cult of the beautiful, or more precisely of aesthetic feeling, this in no way implies that a sense of beauty is mere aestheticism. This is not to say that man is limited to a choice between aestheticism and aesthetics, or, in other words, between idolizing of the beautiful and the science of beauty. Love of beauty is a quality which exists apart from its sentimental deviations and its intellectual foundations. Beauty is a reflection of DIVINE bliss, and since God is Truth, the reflection of His bliss will be that mixture of happiness and truth which is to be found in all beauty. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
From an ascetico-mystical or penitential point of view beauty may appear as something worldly, because such a point of view tends to look at everything with the eye of the will; beauty is then confounded with desire. But from the intellective point of view – which is that of the nature of things and not that of expediency – beauty is spiritual, since in its own way it externalizes Truth and Bliss. That is why the born contemplative cannot see or hear beauty without perceiving in it something of God; and this DIVINE content allows him the more easily to detach himself from appearances. As for passional man, he sees in beauty the world, seduction, the ego; it distances him from the ‘one thing needful’, at least in the case of natural beauty, though not in the case of the beauty of sacred art, for then the ‘one thing needful’ harnesses the need for beauty in the cause of piety, of fervour and of heaven. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
Art should have both a human and a DIVINE character: human with respect to surrounding nature, which serves as its materia prima, and DIVINE with respect to the undetermined and unqualified human being, to the bare fact of our psychological existence. In the first case art detaches the human work from nature by reason of the fact that – far from being merely imitated – nature is interpreted and transfigured according to spiritual and technical laws; in the second case the raw human being receives an ideal content which organizes, directs and raises him above himself in accordance with the sufficient reason of our human state. It is these two characteristics which determine art and are the justification for its existence. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
The ‘sincerity’ to which certain artists lay claim is far too empty of content and too arbitrary to be able to link up with any truth, unless we are to call ‘truth’ a state of psychological fact without horizons, which, it has to be said, is an abuse of language that is not uncommon. The pretentious pseudo-sincerity of the ‘creators’, far from starting from primordial innocence – or from the healthy spontaneity of a barbarian – is, in fact, only a reaction from complications and stresses unknown to the primitive. It might be called a perverted veracity, for it is contrary, not only to objective truth, but also to the natural modesty and good sense of a virtuous man. What is normal is that a human being should seek his centre of inspiration beyond himself, beyond his sterility as a poor sinner: this will force him into making ceaseless corrections and a continuous adjustment in the face of an external norm, in short into changes which will compensate for his ignorance and lack of universality. A normal artist touches up his work, not because he is dishonest, but because he takes account of his own imperfection; a good man corrects himself wherever he can. The work of an artist is not a training in spontaneity – talent is not something that is acquired – but a humble and instructed search, either assiduous or joyously carefree, for perfection of form and expression according to sacred prototypes which are both heavenly and collective in their inspiration. Such inspiration in no wise excludes the inspiration of the individual but gives it its range of action and at the same time guarantees its spiritual value. The artist effaces and forgets himself; all the better if genius gives him wings. But before all else his work retraces that of the soul which transforms itself in conformity with a DIVINE model. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
Metaphysical or mystical poets such as Dante and some of the troubadours, and also the Sufi poets, expressed spiritual realities through the beauty of their souls. It is a matter of spiritual endowment far more than a question of method, for it is not given to every man sincerely to formulate truths which are beyond the range of ordinary humanity. Even if the concern was only to introduce a symbolical terminology into a poem, it would still be necessary to be a true poet in order to succeed without betrayal. Whatever one may think of the symbolistic intention of the Vita Nuova or the ‘Song of Wine’ (by Omar ibn al-Färidh) or the quatrains of Omar Khayyam, it is not possible knowingly to deny the poetical quality of such works, and it is this quality which, from an artistic point of view, justifies the intention in question; moreover the same symbiosis of poetry and symbolism is to be found in prototypes of DIVINE inspiration such as the ‘Song of Songs’. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
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
There are two aspects to every symbol: the first of these adequately reflects the DIVINE function and so constitutes the sufficient reason for the symbolism; the other consists simply of the reflection as such and is therefore contingent. The first of these aspects is the content, while the second is the mode of its manifestation. When we say ‘femininity’, we have no need to consider the possible modes of expression of the feminine principle; it is not the species, race or individual that matters, only the feminine quality. It is the same with every symbolism: thus the sun on the one hand presents a content, which is its luminosity, its caloricity, its central position and its immutability in relation to the planets; and on the other hand it presents a mode of manifestation, namely its matter, its density and its spatial limitation. It is clearly the qualities of the sun and not its limitations which manifest something of God. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
And this manifestation is adequate, for a symbol is basically nothing other than the Reality it symbolizes, in so far as that Reality is limited by the particular existential level in which it ‘incarnates’. This must needs be so, for nothing is absolutely outside God; were it otherwise there would be things that were absolutely limited, absolutely imperfect, absolutely ‘other than God’ – a supposition that is metaphysically absurd. To say that the sun is God is false in so far as it implies that ‘God is the sun’; but it is equally false to pretend that the sun is only an incandescent mass and absolutely nothing else, for this would be to cut it off from its DIVINE Cause; it would be to deny that the effect is always something of the Cause. It is superfluous to introduce into the definition of symbolism reservations which, though they pay tribute to the absolute transcendence of the DIVINE Principle, are none the less foreign to a purely intellectual contemplation of things. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
One may wonder why the Hindus, and still more so the Buddhists, did not fear to furnish their sacred art with occasions for a fall, given that beauty – sexual beauty above all – invites to “let go of the prey for its shadow,” that is, to forget the transcendent content through being attached to the earthly husk. Now it is not for nothing that Buddhist art, more than any other, has given voice to the terrible aspects of cosmic manifestation, which at the very least constitutes a “reestablishing of the balance”: the spectator is warned, he cannot lose sight of the everywhere present menace of the pitiless samsâra, nor that of the Guardians of the Sanctuary. Darshan – the contemplation of the DIVINE in nature or in art – quite clearly presupposes a contemplative temperament; now it is this very temperament that comprises a sufficient guarantee against the spirit of compliance and profanation. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body
The great spiritual methods, even those which insist the most expressly on the excellence of the eremitical life, have never excluded the possibility of following a path in the midst of the occupations of life in the world; the example of the Third Orders is proof of this. The question we propose to answer here is that of knowing how it is possible to reconcile an intense spiritual life with the obligations of outward life, and even to integrate those obligations into the inward life; for if one’s daily work – whether one’s profession or housework – does not constitute an obstacle to the spiritual path, this implies that it should play the role of a positive element in it, or more precisely the role of a secondary support for the realization of the DIVINE within us. Such an integration of work into spirituality depends on three fundamental conditions which we shall designate respectively by the terms “necessity,” “sanctification” and “perfection.” sophiaperennis: THE SPIRITUAL MEANING OF WORK
Finally, the third condition implies the logical perfection of the work, for it is evident that one cannot offer an imperfect thing to God, nor consecrate a base object to Him; moreover, the perfection of the act is as self-evident as that of existence itself, in the sense that every act is supposed to retrace the DIVINE Act and at the same time a modality of it. This perfection of action comprises three aspects, which refer respectively to the activity as such, then to the means and finally to the purpose; in other words, the activity as such ought to be objectively and subjectively perfect, which implies that it be conformable or proportionate to the end to be attained; the means should also be conformable and proportionate to the goal envisioned, which implies that the instrument of the work be well chosen, then wielded with skill, which is to say in perfect conformity with the nature of the work; finally, the result of the work has to be perfect, and must answer exactly to the need from which it has arisen. sophiaperennis: THE SPIRITUAL MEANING OF WORK
If these conditions, which constitute what could be called the internal and external “logic” of the activity, are properly fulfilled, the work not only will no longer be an obstacle to the inward path, it will – 4 – even be a help. Conversely, work poorly done will always be an impediment to the path, because it does not correspond to any DIVINE Possibility; God is Perfection, and man – in order to approach God – must be perfect in action as well as in non-active contemplation. (in The transfiguration of Man, World Wisdom) sophiaperennis: THE SPIRITUAL MEANING OF WORK
…let us return for a moment to the modern scientific outlook, since it plays so decisive a part in the modern mentality. There seems to be absolutely no reason for going into raptures about space-flights; the saints in their ecstasies climb infinitely higher, and these words are used in no allegorical sense, but in a perfectly concrete sense that could be called “scientific” or “exact”. In vain does modern science explore the infinitely distant and the infinitely small; it can reach in its own way the world of galaxies and that of molecules, but it is unaware — since it believes neither in Revelation nor in pure intellection — of all the immaterial and supra-sensorial worlds that as it were envelop our sensorial dimensions, and in relation to which these dimensions are no more than a sort of fragile coagulation, destined to disappear when its time comes before the blinding power of the DIVINE Reality. To postulate a science without metaphysic is a flagrant contradiction, for without metaphysic there can be no standards and no criteria, no intelligence able to penetrate, contemplate and coordinate. Both a relativistic psychologism which ignores the absolute, and also evolutionism which is absurd because contradictory (since the greater cannot come from the less) can be explained only by this exclusion of what is essential and total in intelligence. (Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 130). sophiaperennis: Modern science, and the infinitely distant and the infinitely small
The man who wishes to know the visible -to know it both in entirety and in depth – is obliged for that very reason to know the Invisible, on pain of absurdity and ineffectualness; to know it according to the principles which the very nature of the Invisible imposes on the human mind; hence to know it by being aware that the solution to the contradictions of the objective world is found only in the transpersonal essence of the subject, namely in the pure Intellect. (From the DIVINE to the Human, p.143). sophiaperennis: Limits of modern science
Subjectivity is intrinsically unique while being extrinsically multiple; now if the spectacle of a host of subjectivities other than our own causes us no great perplexity, how can it be explained “scientifically” – that is, avoiding or eliminating all contradiction – that “I alone” am “I”? So-called “exact” science can find no reason whatever for this apparent absurdity, any more than it can for that other logical and empirical contradiction which is the limitlessness of space, time and the other existential categories. Whether we like it or not, we live surrounded by mysteries, which logically and existentially lead us towards transcendence. (From the DIVINE to the Human, p. 141). sophiaperennis: Science and logic
The absurdity of scientism is the contradiction between the finite and the Infinite, that is, the impossibility of reducing the latter to the former, and the incapacity to integrate the former into the latter; and also the inability to understand that an erudition which cuts itself off from initial Unity can lead only to the innumerable, hence to the indefinite, to shattering and no nothingness… (From the DIVINE to the Human, 141-142) sophiaperennis: Science and logic
The position of science is exactly like that of a man who, by hypothesis, could grasp only two dimensions of space and who denied the third because he was incapable of imagining it ; now what one spatial dimension is to another, so is the suprasensible to the sensible, or more precisely, so is the psychical to the corporeal, the spiritual to the animic, and the DIVINE to the humanly spiritual. (Logic and Transcendence, p. 41). sophiaperennis: Science and Metaphysics
We say this without any optimism and without losing sight of the fact that the present world is a necessary evil the metaphysical root of which in the last analysis is to be sought in the infinity of DIVINE Possibility. (Castes and Races, p. 19-21). sophiaperennis: Science and mythologies
Man is at once subject and object: he is subject in relation to the world that he perceives and the Invisible that he conceives of, but he is object in relation to his “own Self”; the empirical ego is really a content, hence an object, of the pure subject or of the ego-principle, and all the more so in relation to the immanent DIVINE Subject which, in final analysis, is our true “One-Self”. This brings us to the Advaitin inquiry “Who am I?”, made famous by Shri Ramana Maharshi; I am neither this body, nor this soul, nor this intelligence; what alone remains is Âtmâ. sophiaperennis: Ramana Maharshi
In reality, gnosis is essentially the path of the intellect and hence of intellection; the driving force of this path is above all intelligence, and not will and sentiment as is the case in the Semitic monotheistic mysticisms, including average Sufism. Gnosis is characterized by its recourse to pure metaphysics: the distinction between Atma and Maya and the consciousness of the potential identity between the human subject, jivatma, and the DIVINE Subject, Paramatma. The path comprises on the one hand “comprehension”, and on the other “concentration”; hence doctrine and method. sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
If the opinion which unconditionally confuses the states of waking and of dreaming were well founded and if these two states were equivalent precisely on the plane of relativity — whilst in reality they are so only in the sight of the Absolute — it would ne indifferent whether a man was a sage dreaming he was a fool, or a fool dreaming he was a sage. (Gnosis, DIVINE Wisdom, p. 71). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
The de facto ambiguity of this question is in part explained by the fact that the Hindus, who knew what was implied in such matters, have never in their expositions, which are deliberately elliptical and centered on the essential, gone out of their way to offer precisions which seemed to them pointless; but one must not take dialectical syntheses fro mere simplifications and draw absurd conclusions from the doctrine of illusion, an error of which the ancient followers of Vedanta were clearly not guilty, or they would have been common solipsists. Schopenhauer was wrong in thinking that solipsism is logically irrefutable, but right in declaring solipsists to be ripe for the lunatic asylum. (Gnosis, DIVINE Wisdom, p. 71). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
… an apparently miraculous fact proves nothing in itself, certainly, but it proves everything when it can be placed positively in connection with a traditional spirituality and is accompanied by criteria which guarantee its authenticity. (Gnosis, DIVINE Wisdom, page 43). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
Even miracles, assuming they occur, cannot constitute a proof, given the wonders of magic. It is true that the moderns deny these wonders as well as miracles, but we mention the arguments nevertheless since, in the opinion of the moderns, miracles would prove nothing “if they existed”, since they can be imitated. (NA: Which is not the case, rigorously speaking, for the miracle requires a context which in reality makes it inimitable, otherwise it would have no reason for existing; besides, magic is far from being able to counterfeit all miracles, so much so that the argument in question is exceedingly weak. (From the DIVINE to the human, p. 117).) sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
It happens frequently that anglicized Hindus, as also other Asiatics, mention in the same breath names like Jesus and Gandhi, Shankara and Kierkegaard, Buddha and Goethe, the Holy Virgin and Mrs. X, or affirm that such and such a German musician was a yogi or that the French Revolution was a mystical movement, etc. This fact reveals a total ignorance of certain differences of category which are none the less of capital importance — we would readily say differences of ‘reality’ — as well as a strange lack of sensibility; it also shows a tendency to simplification, due doubtless to the more or less unconscious idea that only ‘realization’ counts and not ‘theory’, whence a completely misplaced and profitless contempt for the objective discerning of phenomena… A typical example of neo-Hindu deviation is the Swami Yogananda, founder in the United States of a “Self-Realisation Fellowship'(SRF!), the president (!) of which is — or was — an American woman. On the other hand we find the ‘discerning of spirits’ present to an eminent degree in a man like (Ananda) Coomaraswamy, and we are not alone in hoping that his influence will grow in his own country. (Gnosis DIVINE Wisdom, p. 57-58, note 1). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
… the modern ‘spirituality’ of India, whether it bases itself on bhakti or jnâna or both at once — not to mention those who think they can do better than the sages of old — this ‘spirituality’, we say, is characterized, not only by a too unilateral confidence in such or such ‘means’, but also and above all by the fact of neglecting, with remarkable lack of consciousness, the human foundations — the ‘human climate’ it might be said — the integrity of which is guaranteed only by tradition and by the sacred. Spiritual ‘short cuts’ exist, certainly, and cannot but exist, since they are possible; but, being founded on pure intellection on the one hand and on subtle and rigorous technique on the other, and on bringing into play both the constitution of the microcosm and universal analogies, such short cuts exact an intellectual preparation and a psychological conditioning anchored in the tradition, apart from which they remain ineffective, or still worse lead in the opposite direction. This is the sin committed by the protagonists of such and such a yoga who believe that they must offer to the least apt and the least informed people a ‘purely scientific’ and ‘nonsectarian’ ‘way’, ‘discovered’ by ancient sages but ‘freed from all superstition’ and all ‘scholasticism’, that is to say, in short, freed from all traditional safeguards and indeed from every adequate reason for existing. (Gnosis DIVINE Wisdom, p. 60-61). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
In order to understand certain error of neo-bhaktism, or of neo-Hinduism in general, it is necessary to recall that unfortunately the opposition between ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’ does not always coincide with the opposition between ‘piety’ and ‘worldliness’; this paradox is a favorite haunt of Satan, for there he finds a fruitful ground for all sorts of seductions and hypocrisies; it amounts, in short, to dishonest speculation on the difference of plane separating doctrinal truth from virtue. Nothing is more agreeable to the Evil One than the cries of indignation of the heretic against the occasional vice of the orthodox, or the pharisaical condemnation, by some orthodox-minded person, of a spiritual value not properly understood; the genesis of the modern West and the easy and rapid modernization of the East are largely to be explained in terms of these inseparable oscillations.(Gnosis DIVINE Wisdom, p. 64) sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
There are neo-Hindu ‘reformers’ who want to ‘reject all these fables about cults, this blowing of conches, this ringing of bells’, and even ‘all pride of knowledge and study of the Shastras, and all those methods for attaining personal deliverance…’ But if the Brahmans had not blown conches during thousands of years, none of you ‘reformers’ of India today would even exist ! (Gnosis DIVINE Wisdom, p. 65, note 1) sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
If paganism cannot be reduced to a cult of spirits, — a cult which is in practice atheistic though it does not exclude the theoretical idea of God, (NA: There are fetishist Negroes who are not ignorant of God but are astonished that Monotheists should address Him, since he ‘dwells on inaccessible heights’. . (Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, p.71-72).) — it may properly be called an ‘angelotheism’; the fact that the worship is addressed to God ‘in his diversity’, so to speak, is not enough to prevent the reduction of the DIVINE — in men’s thoughts — to the level of created powers. The DIVINE unity has precedence over the DIVINE character of this diversity, and it is more important to believe in God — and so in the One — than to believe in the divinity of some universal principle. sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
Paganism consists in the reducing of religion to a sort of utilitarianism, and this leads to syncretism and heresy. It leads to syncretism because the most heteroclite divinities and cults are added to the original cult without any assimilation or integration: it leads to heresy because the DIVINE qualities are confounded with the angelic powers which are in their turn brought down to the level of human passions. The very way in which the ancients represented the gods proves clearly that they no longer understood them. (Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, p.72). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
If the Freudian psychology declares that rationality is but a hypocritical cloak for a repressed animality, this statement, evidently of a rational nature, falls under the same reproach ; Freudianism, were it right, would itself be nothing else but a symbolistic denaturing of psychophysical instincts. Doubtless the psychoanalysts will say that, in their case, reasoning is not function of repressions, which they do not care to admit ; but it is difficult to see, first on what grounds this exception would be admissible in terms of their own doctrine, and second, why this law of exception would apply only in their favor and not in favor of those spiritual doctrines which they reject with such animus and with a monstrous lack of any sense of proportion. In any case, nothing can be more absurd than for a man to make himself the accuser, not of some psychological accident or other, but of man as such : whence comes this demigod who accuses, and from where does he obtain this faculty for accusation? If the accuser himself is right, this must mean that man is not bad after all and that he is capable of objectivity. Otherwise we would have to admit that the champions of psychoanalysis are DIVINE beings unpredictably fallen from heaven, a somewhat unlikely proposition, to say the least. (Logic and Transcendence, p. 10-11). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
… the feminine body is far too perfect and spiritually too eloquent to be no more than a kind of transitory accident. (From the DIVINE to the Human, p. 91) sophiaperennis: Femininity
… the message of both human bodies, the masculine and the feminine: message of ascending and unitive verticality in both cases, certainly, but in rigorous, transcendent, objective, abstract, rational and mathematical mode in the first case, and in gentle, immanent, concrete, emotional and musical mode in the second. From the DIVINE to the Human, p.100. sophiaperennis: Femininity
One of the most salient characteristics of the human body is the breast, which is a solar symbol, with an accentuation differing according to sex: noble and glorious radiation in both cases, but manifesting power in the first case and generosity in the second; the power and generosity of pure Being. The heart is the center of man, and the breast is so to speak the face of the heart: and since the heart-intellect comprises both Knowledge and Love, it is plausible that in the human body this polarization manifests itself by the complementarity of the masculine and feminine breasts. (From the DIVINE to the Human, p. 94-95) sophiaperennis: Femininity
Feminism, far from being able to confer on woman ‘rights’ that are non-existent because contrary to the nature of things, can only remove from her her specific dignity; it is the abolition of the eternal-feminine, of the glory that woman derives from her celestial prototype. After all, the revolt of one sex against the other, like the cult of youth or the contempt of intelligence, is indirectly a revolt against God. (Gnosis, DIVINE Wisdom, page 54). sophiaperennis: Femininity