We have said that the driving force of the path of gnosis is intelligence; now it is far from being the case that this principle is applicable in a spiritual society – unless it is not very numerous – for in general, intelligence is largely inoperative once it is called upon to hold a collectivity in balance; in all justice, one cannot deny in sentimental and humilitarian moralism a certain realism and hence a corresponding efficacy. It follows from all this, not that gnosis has to repudiate socially its principle of the primacy of intelligence, but that it must put each thing in its place and take men as they are; that is precisely why the perspective of gnosis will be the first to insist, not upon a simplifying moralism, but upon intrinsic virtue, which – like beauty – is “the splendor of the true.” Intelligence must be not only objective and conceptual, but also subjective and EXISTENTIAL; the unicity of the object demands the totality of the subject. sophiaperennis: Gnosis
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
From the point of view of the Platonists – in the widest sense – the return to God is inherent in the fact of existence: our being itself offers the way of return, for that being is divine in its nature, otherwise it would be nothing; that is why we must return, passing through the strata of our ontological reality, all the way to pure Substance, which is one; it is thus that we become perfectly “ourselves”. Man realizes what he knows: a full comprehension – in the light of the Absolute – of relativity dissolves it and leads back to the Absolute. Here again there is no irreducible antagonism between Greeks and Christians: if the intervention of Christ can become necessary, it is not because deliverance is something other than a return, through the strata of our own being, to our true Self, but because the function of Christ is to render such a return possible. It is made possible on two planes, the one EXISTENTIAL and exoteric and the other intellectual and esoteric; the second plane is hidden in the first, which alone appears in the full light of day, and that is the reason why for the common run of mortals the Christian perspective is only EXISTENTIAL and separative, not intellectual and unitive. This gives rise to another misunderstanding between Christians and Platonists: while the Platonists propound liberation by Knowledge because man is an intelligence (NA: Islam, in conformity with its ” paracletic” charact er, reflects this point of view – which is also that of the Vedanta and of all other forms of gnosis – in a Semitic and religious mode, and realizes it all the more readily in its esoterism; like the Hellenist, the Moslem asks first of all: “What must I know or admit, seeing that I have an intelligence capable of objectivity and of totality?” and not a priori “What must I want, since I have a will that is free, but fallen?”) the Christians envisage in their over-all doctrine a salvation by Grace because man is an existence – as such separated from God – and a fallen and impotent will. Once again, the Greeks can be reproached for having at their command but a single way, inaccessible in fact to the majority, and for giving the impression that it is philosophy that saves, just as one can reproach the Christians for ignoring liberation by Knowledge and for assigning an absolute character to our EXISTENTIAL and volitive reality alone and to means appropriate to that aspect of our being, or for taking into consideration our EXISTENTIAL relativity and not our “intellectual absoluteness”; nevertheless the reproach to the Greeks cannot concern their sages, any more than the reproach to the Christians can attack their gnosis, nor in a general way their sanctity. sophiaperennis: Platonism and Christianity
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
It is necessary to dissipate here an error which would have it that everything in nature is beautiful and everything of traditional production is likewise beautiful because it belongs to tradition; according to this view, ugliness does not exist either in the animal or the vegetable kingdoms, since, it seems, every creature “is perfectly what it should be”, which has really no connection with the aesthetic question; likewise it is said that the most magnificent of sanctuaries possesses no more beauty than some tool or other, always because the tool “is everything that it should be”. This is tantamount to maintaining not only that an ugly animal species is aesthetically the equivalent of a beautiful species, but also that beauty is such merely through the absence of ugliness and not through its own content, as if the beauty of a man were the equivalent of that of a butterfly, or of a flower or a precious stone. Beauty, however, is a cosmic quality which cannot be reduced to abstractions foreign to its nature; likewise, the ugly is not only that which is not completely what it is supposed to be, nor is it only an accidental infirmity or a lack of taste; it is in everything which manifests, accidentally or substantially, artificially or naturally, a privation of ontological truth, of EXISTENTIAL goodness, or, what amounts to the same, of reality. Ugliness is, very paradoxically, the manifestation of a relative nothingness: of a nothingness which can affirm itself only by denying or eroding an element of Being, and thus of beauty. This amounts to saying that, in a certain fashion and speaking elliptically, the ugly is less real than the beautiful, and in short that it exists only thanks to an underlying beauty which it disfigures; in a word, it is the reality of an unreality, or the possibility of an impossibility, like all privative manifestations. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS
The argument that aesthetic quality is far from always coinciding with moral quality and that it is consequently superfluous – an argument that is just in its observation but false in its conclusion – overlooks an obvious fact, namely that the ontological and in principle spiritual merit of beauty remains intact on its own level; the fact that an aesthetic quality may not be fully exploited does not mean that it could not and should not be, and it would then prove its spiritual potentiality and so its true nature. Inversely, ugliness is a privation even when it is allied to sanctity, which cannot make it positive, but which obviously neutralizes it, just as moral badness sterilizes beauty, but without abolishing it as far as the EXISTENTIAL, not the volitive, aspect is concerned. (NA: There is all the difference, in a face, between the features as such and the expression, or between the form of a body and its gestures, or again, between the form of an eye and its look. Nevertheless, even the look of a morally imperfect person can have beauty when it expresses spring, or youth, or simply happiness, or a good sentiment, or sadness; but all of this is a question of degree, either in respect of natural beauty or in respect of moral imperfection.) sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS
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
But as a general rule form takes a higher place, aesthetically speaking, than expression – unless the latter is deliberately concerned with stressing ugliness – in the sense that its normative character and thus its regularity of substance and of proportions constitutes the prime condition of aesthetic value; for wherever harmony or balance are lacking in the form itself, beauty of expression no longer appears as a decisive factor in the order of sensible beauty, this order being by definition that of formal perfection or of truth in form. Beauty of soul can indeed enhance that of the body, or even assert its supremacy to the point of submerging or extinguishing the corporeal, but it cannot purely and simply replace the beauty of the body as though the body did not exist and did not itself have a right to the perfection which is its EXISTENTIAL norm. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty
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
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 multiform beauty of a sanctuary is like the crystallization of a spiritual flux or of a stream of blessings. It is as though invisible and celestial power had fallen into matter – which hardens, divides and scatters – and had transformed it into a shower of precious forms, into a sort of planetary system of symbols, surrounding us and penetrating us from every side. The impact, if one may so call it, is analogous to that of the benediction itself; it is direct and EXISTENTIAL; it goes beyond thought and seizes our being in its very substance. There are blessings which are like snow; and others which are like wine; all can be crystallized in sacred art. What is exteriorized in such art is both doctrine and blessing, geometry and the music of Heaven. 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
The human body comprises three fundamental regions: the body properly so-called, the head, the sexual parts; these are almost three different subjectivities. The head represents both intellectual and individual subjectivity; the body, collective and archetypal subjectivity, that of masculinity or femininity or that of race or caste; finally, the sexual parts manifest, quite paradoxically, a dynamic subjectivity at once animal and divine, if one may express it thus. In other words, the face expresses a thought, a becoming aware of something, a truth; the body, for its part, expresses a being, an EXISTENTIAL synthesis; and the sexual parts, a love both creative and liberat ing: mystery of the generous substance that unfolds in the accidents, and of the blessed accidents that flow back towards the substance; glory of self-giving and glory of delivering. The human body in its integrality is intelligence, existence, love; certitude, serenity and faith. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body
One of the functions of dress is, no doubt, to isolate mental subjectivity, that which thinks and speaks, from the two EXISTENTIAL subjectivities which risk disturbing the message of thought with their own messages; but this is nonetheless a question of temperament and custom, more or less primordial man having in this respect reflexes other than those of man too marked by the fall; of man become at once too cerebral and too passional, and having lost much of his beauty and also his innocence. The gait of the human being is as evocative as his vertical posture; whereas the animal is horizontal and only advances towards itself – that is, it is enclosed within its own form – man, in advancing, transcends himself; even his forward movement seems vertical, it denotes a pilgrimage towards his Archetype, towards the celestial Kingdom, towards God. The beauty of the anterior side of the human body indicates the nobleness, on the one hand of man’s vocational end, and on the other hand of his manner of approaching it; it indicates that man directs himself towards God and that he does so in a manner that is “humanly divine,” if one may say so. But the posterior side of the body also has its meaning: it indicates, on the one hand the noble innocence of the origin, and on the other hand the noble manner of leaving behind himself what has been transcended; it expresses, positively, whence we have come and, negatively, how we turn our backs to what is no longer ourselves. Man comes from God and he goes towards God; but at the same time, he draws away from an imperfection which is no longer his own and draws nearer to a perfection which is not yet his. His “becoming” bears the imprint of a “being”; he is that which he becomes, and he becomes that which he is. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body
Modern science, which is rationalist as to its subject and materialist as to its object, can describe our situation physically and approximately, but it can tell us nothing about our extra-spatial situation in the total and real Universe. Astronomers know more or less where we are in space, in what relative “place”, in which of the peripheral arms of the Milky Way, and they may perhaps know where the Milky Way is situated among the other assemblages of stardust; but they do not know where we are in EXISTENTIAL “space”, namely, in a state of hardness and at the center or summit thereof, and that we are simultaneously on the edge of an immense “rotation”, which is not other than the current of forms, the “samsaric” flow of phenomena, the panta rhei of Heraclitus. Profane science, in seeking to pierce to its depth the mystery of the things that contain — space, time, matter, energy — forget the mystery of the things that are contained: it tries to explain the quintessential properties of our bodies and the intimate functioning of our souls, but it does not know what intelligence and existence are; consequently, seeing what its “principles” are, it cannot be otherwise than ignorant of what man is. (Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 111). sophiaperennis: Does modern science know what man is
In reality the “planimetric” recording of perceptions and the elimination of the apparently contradictory only too often give the measure of a given ignorance, even of a given stupidity; the pedants of “exact science” are moreover incapable of evaluating what is implied by the EXISTENTIAL paradoxes in which we live, beginning with the phenomenon, contradictory in practice, of subjectivity. sophiaperennis: Science and logic
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
Psychoanalysis has succeeded in perverting intelligence by giving rise to a “psychoanalytical complex” that corrupts all and sundry. If it be possible to deny the absolute in many different ways, psychological and EXISTENTIAL relativism Denies it within intelligence itself: the latter is practically set up as a god, but at the price of all that constitutes its intrinsic nature, its value, and its effectiveness ; intelligence becomes “adult” through its own destruction. (Logic and Transcendence, p. 14-15). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
Beauty has something pacifying and dilating in it, something consoling and liberating, because it communicates a substance of truth, of evidence and of certitude, and it does so in a concrete and EXISTENTIAL mode; thus it is like a mirror of our transpersonal and eternally blissful essence. (The Play of Masks, p. 46) sophiaperennis: Femininity