earth

The desire to transcend the plane of logic is combined, in a certain sectarianism hostile to discursive expression, with the desire to transcend the “scission” between the subject and the object; now this complementary opposition does not prevent the known — whatever the situation of the knower — from being of the loftiest order. The subject and the object are not adversaries; they unite in a fusion that — according to the content of the perception — can have an interiorizing and liberating virtue, of which aesthetic enjoyment and the union of love are the foremost examples. In Atmâ, the triad Sat, Chit, Ananda — “Being, Consciousness, Beatitude” — is not a factor of scission; similarly, on earth, the dimensions of physical space do not prevent space from being one, so that we perceive no fissure in it. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy

It may be objected that our preceding considerations on the human phenomenon are not an exposition of anthropology properly so called, since we offer no information on the “natural history” of man nor a fortiori on his biological origin, and so on. Now such is not our intention; we do not wish to deal with factors that escape our experience, and we are very far from accepting the “stopgap” theory of transformist evolutionism. Original man was not a simian being barely capable of speaking and standing upright; he was a quasi-immaterial being enclosed in an aura still celestial, but deposited on earth; an aura similar to the “chariot of fire” of Elijah or the “cloud” that enveloped Christ’s ascension. That is to say, our conception of the origin of mankind is based on the doctrine of the projection of the archetypes ab intra; thus our position is that of classical emanationism – in the Neoplatonic or gnostic sense of the term – which avoids the pitfall of anthropomorphism while agreeing with the theological conception of creatio ex nihilo. Evolutionism is the very negation of the archetypes and consequently of the divine Intellect; it is therefore the negation of an entire dimension of the real, namely that of form, of the static, of the immutable; concretely speaking, it is as if one wished to make a fabric of the wefts only, omitting the warps. 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

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

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

Saints and heroes are like the appearance of stars on earth; they rescind after their death to the firmament, to their eternal home; they are almost pure symbols, spiritual signs only provisionally detached from the celestial iconostasis in which they have been enshrined since the creation of the world. sophiaperennis: Jacques Maritain

For if our intelligence is by definition ineffectual, if we are irresponsible beings or lumps of earth, there is no sense in philosophizing. What we are being pressed to admit is that our spirit is relative in its very essence, that this essence comprises no stable standards of measurement – as if the sufficient reason of the human intellect were not precisely that it should comprise some such standards ! – and that consequently the ideas of truth and falsehood are intrinsically relative, and so always floating; and because certain consequences of accumulated errors fall foul of our innate standards and are unmasked and stigmatized by them, we are told that it is a question of habit and that we must change our nature, that is to say, that we must create a new intelligence that finds beautiful what is ugly and accepts as true what is false. sophiaperennis: Relativism

In Plotinus the essence of Platonism reveals itself without any reserves. Here one passes from the passion-centered body to the virtuous soul and from the soul to the cognizant Spirit, then from and through the Spirit to the suprarational and unitive vision of the ineffable One, which is the source of all that exists; in the One the thinking subject and the object of thought coincide. The One projects the Spirit as the sun projects light and heat: that is to say, the Spirit, Nous, emanates eternally from the One and contemplates It. By this contemplation the Spirit actualizes in itself the world of the archetypes or ideas – the sum of essential or fundamental possibilities – and thereafter produces the animic world; the latter in its turn engenders the material world – this dead end where the reflections of the possibilities coagulate and combine. The human soul, brought forth by the One from the world of the archetypes, recognizes these in their earthly reflections, and it tends by its own nature toward its celestial origin. With Aristotle, we are much closer to the earth, though not yet so close as to find ourselves cut off from heaven. If by rationalism is meant the reduction of the intelligence to logic alone and hence the negation of intellectual intuition (which in reality has no need of mental supports even though they may have to be used for communicating perceptions of a supramental order), then it will be seen that Aristotelianism is a rationalism in principle but not absolutely so in fact, since its theism and hylomorphism depend on Intellection and not on reasoning alone. (NA: Hylomorphism is a plausible thesis, but what is much less plausible is the philosopher’s opposition of this thesis to the Platonic Ideas, of which it is really only a prolongation, one that tends to exteriorize things to a dangerous degree just because of the absence of those Ideas.) And this is true of every philosophy that conveys metaphysical truths since an unmitigated rationalism is possible only where these truths or intellections are absent. (NA: Kantian theism does not benefit from this positive reservation; for Kant, God is only a “postulate of practical reason,” which takes us infinitely far away from the real and transcendent God of Aristotle.) 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

The cosmic, or more particularly the earthly function of beauty is to actualize in the intelligent creature the Platonic recollection of the archetypes, right up to the luminous Night of the Infinite. (NA: According to Pythagoras and Plato, the soul has heard the heavenly harmonies before being exiled on earth, and music awakens in the soul the remembrance of these melodies.) This leads us to the conclusion that the full understanding of beauty demands virtue and is identifiable with it: that is to say, just as it is necessary to distinguish, in objective beauty, between the outward structure and the message in depth, so there is a distinguo to make, in the sensing of the beautiful, between the aesthetic sensation and the corresponding beauty of soul, namely such and such a virtue. Beyond every question of “sensible consolation” the message of beauty is both intellectual and moral: intellectual because it communicates to us, in the world of accidentality, aspects of Substance, without for all that having to address itself to abstract thought; and moral, because it reminds us of what we must love, and consequently be. In conformity with the Platonic principle that like attracts like, Plotinus states that “it is always easy to attract the Universal Soul . . . by constructing an object capable of undergoing its influence and receiving its participation. The faithful representation of a thing is always capable of undergoing the influence of its model; it is like a mirror which is capable of grasping the thing’s appearance.” (NA: This principle does not prevent a heavenly influence mani festing itself incident ally or accidentally even in an image which is extremely imperfect – works of perversion and subversion being excluded – through pure mercy and by virtue of the ‘exception that proves the rule”.) This passage states the crucial principle of the almost magical relationship between the conforming recipient and the predestined content or between the adequate symbol and the sacramental presence of the prototype. The ideas of Plotinus must be understood in the light of those of the “divine Plato”: the latter approved the fixed types of the sacred sculptures of Egypt, but he rejected the works of the Greek artists who imitated nature in its outward and insignificant accidentality, while following their individual imagination. This verdict immediately excludes from sacred art the productions of an exteriorizing, accidentalizing, sentimentalist and virtuoso naturalism, which sins through abuse of intelligence as much as by neglect of the inward and the essential. sophiaperennis: Plato

From a certain point of view, the Christian argument is the historicity of the Christ-Saviour, whereas the Platonic or “Aryan” argument is the nature of things or the Immutable. If, to speak symbolically, all men are in danger of drowning as a consequence of the fall of Adam, the Christian saves him-sell by grasping the pole held out to him by Christ, whereas the Platonist saves himself by swimming; but neither course weakens or neutralizes the effectiveness of the other. On the one hand there are certainly men who do not know how to swim or who are prevented from doing so, but on the other hand swimming is undeniably among the possibilities open to man; the whole thing is to know what counts most in any situation whether individual or collective.6 We have seen that Hellenism, like all directly or indirectly sapiential doctrines, is founded on the axiom man – intelligence rather than man – will, and that is one of the reasons why it had to appear as inoperative in the eyes of a majority of Christians; but only of a majority because the Christian gnostics could not apply such a reproach to the Pythagoreans and Platonists; the gnostics could not do otherwise than admit the primacy of the intellect, and for that reason the idea of divine redemption meant to them something very different from and more far-reaching than a mysticism derived from history and a sacramental dogmatism. It is necessary to repeat once more – as others have said before and better – that sacred facts are true because they retrace on their own plane the nature of things, and not the other way round: the nature of things is not real or normative because it evokes certain sacred facts. The principles, essentially accessible to pure intelligence – if they were not so man would not be man, and it is almost blasphemy to deny that human intelligence considered in relation to animal intelligence has a supernatural side – the universal principles confirm the sacred facts, which in their turn reflect those principles and derive their efficacy from them; it is not history, whatever it may contain, that confirms the principles. This relationship is expressed by the Buddhists when they say that spiritual truth is situated beyond the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, and that it derives its evidence from the depths of Being itself, or from the innateness of Truth in all that is. In the sapiential perspective the divine redemption is always present; it PRE-exists all terrestrial alchemy and is its celestial model, so that it is always thanks to this eternal redemption – whatever may be its vehicle on earth – that man is freed from the weight of his vagaries and even, Deo volente, from that of his separative existence; if “my Words shall not pass away” it is because they have always been. The Christ of the gnostics is he who is “before Abraham was” and from whom arise all the ancient wisdoms; a consciousness of this, far from diminishing a participation in the treasures of the historical Redemption, confers on them a compass that touches the very roots of Existence. sophiaperennis: Platonism and Christianity

The cosmic, or more particularly the earthly function of beauty is to actualize in the intelligent creature the Platonic recollection of the archetypes, right up to the luminous Night of the Infinite. (NA: According to Pythagoras and Plato, the soul has heard the heavenly harmonies before being exiled on earth, and music awakens in the soul the remembrance of these melodies.) This leads us to the conclusion that the full understanding of beauty demands virtue and is identifiable with it: that is to say, just as it is necessary to distinguish, in objective beauty, between the outward structure and the message in depth, so there is a distinguo to make, in the sensing of the beautiful, between the aesthetic sensation and the corresponding beauty of soul, namely such and such a virtue. Beyond every question of “sensible consolation” the message of beauty is both intellectual and moral: intellectual because it communicates to us, in the world of accidentality, aspects of Substance, without for all that having to address itself to abstract thought; and moral, because it reminds us of what we must love, and consequently be. In conformity with the Platonic principle that like attracts like, Plotinus states that “it is always easy to attract the Universal Soul . . . by constructing an object capable of undergoing its influence and receiving its participation. The faithful representation of a thing is always capable of undergoing the influence of its model; it is like a mirror which is capable of grasping the thing’s appearance.” (NA: This principle does not prevent a heavenly influence mani festing itself incident ally or accidentally even in an image which is extremely imperfect – works of perversion and subversion being excluded – through pure mercy and by virtue of the ‘exception that proves the rule”.) sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

Sacred art is vertical and ascending, whereas profane art is horizontal and equilibrating. In the beginning, nothing was profane; each tool was a symbol, and even decoration was symbolistic and sacral. With the passage of time, however, the imagination increasingly spread itself on the earthly plane, and man felt the need for an art that was for him and not for Heaven alone; the earth too, which in the beginning was experienced as a prolongation or an image of Heaven, progressively became earth pure and simple, that is to say that the human being increasingly felt himself to possess the right to be merely human. If religion tolerates this art, it is because it nevertheless has its legitimate function in the economy of spiritual means, within the horizontal or earthly dimension, and with the vertical or heavenly dimension in view. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

The analogy between artistic naturalism and modern science permits us at this point to make a digression. We do not reproach modern science for being a fragmentary, analytical science, lacking in speculative, metaphysical and cosmological elements or for arising from the residues or debris of ancient sciences; we reproach it for being subjectively and objectively a transgression and for leading subjectively and objectively to disequilibrium and so to disaster. Inversely, we do not have for the traditional sciences an unmixed admiration; the ancients also had their scientific curiosity, they too operated by means of conjectures and, whatever their sense of metaphysical or mystical symbolism may have been, they were sometimes – indeed often – mistaken in fields in which they wished to acquire a knowledge, not of transcendent principles, but of physical facts. It is impossible to deny that on the level of phenomena, which nevertheless is an integral part of the natural sciences, to say the least, the ancients – or the Orientals – have had certain inadequate conceptions, or that their conclusions were often most naïve; we certainly do not reproach them for having believed that the earth is flat and that the sun and the firmament revolve around it, since this appearance is natural and providential for man; but one can reproach them for certain false conclusions drawn from certain appearances, in the illusory belief that they were practising, not symbolism and spiritual speculation, but phenomenal or indeed exact science. One cannot, when all is said and done, deny that the purpose of medicine is to cure, not to speculate, and that the ancients were ignorant of many things in this field in spite of their great knowledge in certain others; in saying this, we are far from contesting that traditional medicine had, and has, the immense advantage of a perspective which includes the whole man; that it was, and is, effective in cases in which modern medicine is impotent; that modern medicine contributes to the degeneration of the human species and to over-population; and that an absolute medicine is neither possible nor desirable, and this for obvious reasons. But let no one say that traditional medicine is superior purely on account of its cosmological speculations and in the absence of particular effective remedies, and that modern medicine, which has these remedies, is merely a pitiful residue because it is ignorant of these speculations; or that the doctors of the Renaissance, such as Paracelsus, were wrong to discover the anatomical and other errors of Greco-Arab medicine; or, in an entirely general way, that traditional sciences arc marvellous in all respects and that modern sciences, chemistry for example, are no more than fragments and residues. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

The vocation sine qua non of man is to be spiritual. Spirituality manifests itself on the planes which constitute man, namely intelligence, will, affectivity, production: human intelligence is capable of transcendence, of the absolute, of objectivity; the human will is capable of liberty, and thus of conformity to what is grasped by the intelligence; human feeling (affectivity), which is joined to each of the preceding faculties, is capable of compassion and generosity, by reason of the objectivity of the human mind, which takes the soul out of its animal egoism. Finally, there is the specifically human capacity for production, and it is because of this that man has been called homo faber, and not homo sapiens only: it is the capacity for producing tools and constructing dwellings and sanctuaries, and if need be for making clothes and creating works of art, and also for spontaneously combining in these creations symbolism and harmony. The language of harmony may be simple or rich, depending on needs, perspectives and temperaments; decoration too has its purpose, both from the point of view of symbolism, and from that of musicality. This amounts to saying that this fourth capacity must also have a spiritual content on pain of not being human; its role moreover is simply to exteriorize the three preceding capacities by adapting them to material needs or the needs of worship, or let us simply say by projecting them into the sensible order otherwise than by rational discourse or writing. Exiled on earth as we are, unless we are able to content ourselves with that shadow of Paradise that is virgin nature, we must create for ourselves surroundings which by their truth and their beauty recall our heavenly origin and thereby also awaken our hope. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

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

This allusion to the primordial androgyne – which divided in two well before the successive entry of its halves into matter (NA: And which is realized a posteriori in sexual union.) – permits us to insert a parenthesis here. The human form cannot be transcended, its sufficient reason being precisely to express the Absolute, hence the untranscendable; and this cuts short the metaphysically and physically aberrant imaginations of the evolutionists, according to whom this form would be the result of a prolonged elaboration starting from animal forms; an elaboration which is at once arbitrary and unlimited. Materialists, even those who consider transformist evolution inexplicable and even contradictory, accept this hypothesis as an indispensable idea, which moreover carries us outside of science and into philosophy, or more exactly into rationalism with its reasonings cut off from the very roots of knowledge; and if the evolutionist idea is indispensable to them, it is because in their minds it replaces the concept of a sudden creation ex nihilo, which to them seems the only other possible solution. 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. (NA: One will recall the ” chariot of fire” that lifted up Elijah, and the “cloud” which veiled the Christ during the Ascension.) sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

We have alluded above to the evolutionist error which was inevitable in connection with our considerations on the deiformity of man, and which permits us here to insert a parenthesis. The animal, vegetable and mineral species not only manifest qualities or combinations of qualities, they also manifest defects or combinations of defects; this is required by All-Possibility, which on pain of being limited – of not being what it is – must also express “possible impossibilities,” or let us say negative and paradoxical possibilities; it implies in consequence excess as well as privation, thereby emphasizing norms by means of contrasts. In this respect, 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. (NA: According to the Talmud and the Koran.) This does not prevent the ape from being sacred in India, perhaps on account of its anthropomorphism, or more likely in virtue of associations of ideas due to an extrinsic symbolism; (NA: As was the case for the boar, which represents sacerdotal authority for the Nordics; or as the rhinoceros symbolizes the sannyâsi.) this also would explain in part the role played by the apes in the Ramayana, unless in this case it is a question of subtle creatures – the jinn of Islam – of whom the ape is only a likeness. (NA: The story recounted in the Râmayana is situated at the end of the ” silver age” (Treta- Yuga) and consequently in a climate of possibilities quite different from that of the ” iron age” (Kali- Yuga); the partition between the material and animic states was not yet ” hardened” or ” congealed” as is above all the case in our epoch.) One may wonder whether the intrinsically noble animals, hence those directly allowing of a positive symbolism, are not themselves also theophanies; they are so necessarily, and the same holds true for given plants, minerals, cosmic or terrestrial phenomena, but in these cases the theomorphism is partial and not integral as in man. The splendor of the stag excludes that of the lion, the eagle cannot be the swan, nor the water lily the rose, nor the emerald the sapphire; from a somewhat different point of view , we would say that the sun doubtless manifests in a direct and simple manner the divine Majesty, but that it has neither life nor spirit; (NA: It can nevertheless have a sacrament al function with regard to men who are sensitive to cosmic barakah.) only man is the image-synthesis of the Creator, (NA: And this in spite of the loss of the earthly paradise. One of the effects of what monotheist symbolism calls the ” fall of Adam,” was the separation between the soul and the body, conjointly with the separation between heaven and earth and between the spirit and the soul. The ” resurrection of the flesh” is none other than the restoration of the primordial situation; as the body is an immanent virtuality of the soul, it can be remanifested as soon as the separative ” curse” has drawn to its close, which coincides with the end of a great cycle of humanity.) owing to the fact that he possesses the intellect – hence also reason and language – and that he manifests it by his very form. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

The common illusion of an “absolutely real” within relativity breeds philosophical sophistries and in particular an empiricist and experimental science wishing to unveil the metaphysical mystery of Existence (NA: With the aid of giant telescopes and electronic microscopes, if need be. Goethe, when he refuses to look through a microscope because he did not wish to wrench from Nature what she is unwilling to offer to our human senses, displayed a most just intuition of the limits of all natural science, and at the same time the limits of what is human.); those who seek to enclose the Universe within their shortsighted logic fail to be aware, at least in principle, that the sum of possible phenomenal knowledge is inexhaustible and that, consequently, present “scientific” information represents a naught beside our ignorance – in short that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Shakespeare) and that in order to extend our means of investigation to fit the scale of the total cosmos, we would have to begin by multiplying our human senses in mathematical progression, which brings us back to the unlimited, therefore to the inaccessible and the unknowable. (Treasures of Buddhism, p. 41-42). sophiaperennis: Limits of modern science

People no longer sense the fact that the quantitative richness of a knowledge – of any kind of knowledge – necessarily entails an inward impoverishment, unless accompanied by a spiritual science that reestablishes unity and maintains equilibrium. The common man, if he were able to travel through interplanetary space, would come back to earth terribly impoverished – if his reason had not succumbed in terror. sophiaperennis: Science and technique, industry, machines

If the Bible does not specify that the earth is round, it is simply and solely because it is normal to man to see it as flat, and because collective man cannot even tolerate the notion of a spherical earth, as history has proved to satiety. (NA: If Galileo had been sensitive to the fundamental intention of the Christly message, there is no reason why he should not have taken cognizance of the fact that the earth turns, assuming that he would still have discovered this in such a case; but he would never have had the idea of demanding that the Church should forthwith insert this fact into theology, before it had had a chance of imposing itself upon the learned world of his time, or a fortiori upon the people. However that may be, one must neither seek to inflict on theology the movement of the molecules nor pretend to “leave God outside the laboratory”; what one must do is to prevent the molecules from becoming a religion, and science from being left outside God.) Science is natural to man but it is important above all else to choose between the different levels, in the light of the axiom: “My kingdom is not of this world”; all useful observation of the here below expands science, but the wisdom of the next world limits it, which amounts to saying that every science of the Relative which does not have a limit which is determined by the Absolute, and thus by the spiritual hierarchy of values, ends in supersaturation and explosion. (Logic and Transcendence, p. 135). sophiaperennis: Science and Metaphysics

The common illusion of an “absolutely real” within relativity breeds philosophical sophistries and in particular an empiricist and experimental science wishing to unveil the metaphysical mystery of Existence (NA: With the aid of giant telescopes and electronic microscopes, if need be. Goethe, when he refuses to look through a microscope because he did not wish to wrench from Nature what she is unwilling to offer to our human senses, displayed a most just intuition of the limits of all natural science, and at the same time the limits of what is human.); those who seek to enclose the Universe within their shortsighted logic fail to be aware, at least in principle, that the sum of possible phenomenal knowledge is inexhaustible and that, consequently, present “scientific” information represents a naught beside our ignorance – in short that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Shakespeare) and that in order to extend our means of investigation to fit the scale of the total cosmos, we would have to begin by multiplying our human senses in mathematical progression, which brings us back to the unlimited, therefore to the inaccessible and the unknowable. (Treasures of Buddhism, p. 41-42). sophiaperennis: Science and mystery

What most men do not know – and if they could know it, why should they be called on to believe it? – is that this blue sky, though illusory as an optical error and belied by the vision of interplanetary space, is none the less an adequate reflection of the heaven of the angels and of the blessed and that therefore despite everything it is this blue mirage, flecked with silver clouds, which was right and will have the final say; to be astonished at this amounts to admitting that it is by chance that we are here on earth and see the sky as we do. Of course the black abyss of the galaxies also reflects something, but the symbolism is then shifted and it is no longer a question of the heaven of angels. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

A symbol (NA: The word “symbol” implies “participation” or “aspect”, whatever the difference of level may be involved.) is intrinsically so concrete and so efficacious that celestial manifestations, when they occur in our sensory world, “descend” to earth and “reascend” to Heaven; a symbolism accessible to the senses takes on the function of the supra-sensible reality which its reflects. Light-years and the relativity of the space-time relationship have absolutely nothing to do with the perfectly “exact” and “positive” symbolism of appearances and its connection at once analogical and ontological with the celestial or angelic orders… sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

Modem science represents itself in the world as the principal, or as the only purveyor of truth; according to this style of certainty to know Charlemagne is to know his brain-weight and how tall he was. From the point of view of total truth let it be said once more – it is a thousand times better to believe that God created this world in six days and that the world beyond lies beneath the flat surface of the earth or in the spinning heavens, than it is to know the distance from one nebula to another without knowing that phenomena merely serve to manifest a transcendent Reality which determines us in every respect and gives to our human condition its whole meaning and its whole content. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

A symbol is intrinsically so concrete and so efficacious that celestial manifestations, when they occur in our sensory world, “descend” to earth and “reascend” to Heaven; a symbolism accessible to the senses takes on the function of the supra-sensible reality which its reflects. Light-years and the relativity of the space-time relationship have absolutely nothing to do with the perfectly “exact” and “positive” symbolism of appearances and its connection at once analogical and ontological with the celestial or angelic orders, The fact that the symbol itself may be no more than an optical illusion in no way impairs its precision or its efficacy, for all appearances, including those of space and of the galaxies, are strictly speaking only illusions created by relativity. (Light on the Ancient Worlds, 36-37). sophiaperennis: Science and negation of Transcendence

To believe, with certain ‘neo-yogists’, that ‘evolution’ will produce a superman ‘who will differ from a man as much as man differs from the animal or the animal from the vegetable’ is a case of not knowing what man is. Here is one more example of a pseudo-wisdom which deems itself vastly superior to the ‘separatist’ religions, but which in point of fact shows itself more ignorant than the most elementary catechisms. For the most elementary catechism does know what man is: it knows that by his qualities, and as an autonomous world, he stands opposed to the other kingdoms of nature taken together; it knows that in one particular respect — that of spiritual possibilities, not that of animal nature — the difference between a monkey and a man is infinitely greater than that between a fly and a monkey. For man alone is able to leave the world; man alone is able to return to God; and that is the reason why he cannot in any way be surpassed by a new earthly being. Among the beings of this earth man is the central being; this is an absolute position; there cannot be a center more central than the center, if definitions have any meanings. sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

The profound explanation of the myths of the “sinful” woman, “prisoner” of chthonic powers, “ravished” by a demon, “swallowed” by the earth, or even become infernal — Eve, Eurydice, Sita, Izanami, according to case — this explanation doubtless is to be fond in the scission between the male demiurge and the female demiurge, or between the center and the periphery of the cosmos; this periphery being envisaged then, not as the cosmic substance as such, which remains virgin in relation to its production, but as the totality of these productions; for it is the accidents, and not the substance, which comprise “evil” in all its forms. But, aside from the fact that the substance remains virgin even while being mother, it is redeemed at the very level of its exteriorization through its positive contents, which are in principle sacramental and saving; symbolically speaking, if “woman” was lost through choosing “matter” or the “world”, she was redeemed — and is redeemed — through giving birth to the Avatara. And besides, “everything is Atma”; and “it is not for the love of the husband (or of the wife or the son) that the husband (or the wife or the son) is dear, but for the love of Atma which in him”. That is, the feminine element — the Substance — is by definition a mirror of the Essence, despite its exteriorizing and alienating function; moreover, a mirror is necessarily separated from what it reflects, and therein lies its ambiguity. (Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, p.53-54). sophiaperennis: Femininity

A most striking feature of the North American branch of the Primordial Sanatana Dharma is the doctrine of the four years: the sacred animal of the Plains-Indians, the buffalo, symbolizes the Mahayuga, each of its legs representing a Yuga. At the beginning of this Mahayuga a buffalo was placed by the Great Spirit at the West in order to hold back the water which menace the earth. Every year this bison loses a hear, and in very Yuga it loses a foot. When it will have lost all its hair, and its feet, the water will overwhelm the earth and the Mahayuga will be finished. the analogy with the bull of Dharma in Hinduism is very remarkable; at every Yuga, this bill withdraws a foot, and spirituality loses its strength; and now we are near the end of the kali-yuga. Like the orthodox Hindus, the traditional Red Indians have this conviction, which is obviously true in spite of all the mundane optimism of the modern world; but let us add that the compensation of our very dark age is the Mercy of the Holy Name, as it is emphasized in the Maneuver Dharma Shasta and the Trimmed Bhagavata and other holy scriptures. sophiaperennis: His Holiness and the Red Indian