Man is spirit incarnate; if he were only matter, he would be identified with the feet; if he were only spirit, he would be the head, that is, the Sky; he would be the Great Spirit. But the object of his existence is to be in the middle: it is to transcend matter while being situated there, and to realize the light, the Sky, starting from this intermediary level. It is true that the other creatures also participate in life, but man synthesizes them: he carries all life within himself and thus becomes the spokesman for all life, the vertical axis where life opens onto the spirit and where it becomes spirit. In all terrestrial creatures the cold inertia of matter becomes heat, but in man alone does heat become light. (GTUFS: FSun, A Metaphysic of Virgin Nature)
The very word “man” implies “God”, the very word “relative” implies “Absolute”. (GTUFS: LightAW, Religio Perennis)
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. (GTUFS: LSelf, Orthodoxy and Intellectuality)
Man is first of all characterized by a central or total intelligence, and not one that is merely peripheral or partial; secondly he is characterized by a free and not merely instinctive will; and thirdly by a character capable of compassion and generosity, and not merely of egoistic reflexes. As for animals, they cannot know what is beyond the senses, even though they may be sensitive to the sacred; they cannot choose against their instincts, even though they may instinctively make a sacrifice; they cannot transcend themselves, even though an animal species may manifest nobility. Of man it may also be said that he is essentially capable of knowing the True, whether it be absolute or relative; he is capable of willing the Good, whether it be essential or secondary, and of loving the Beautiful, whether it be interior or exterior. In other words: the human being is substantially capable of knowing, willing and loving the Sovereign Good. The Sovereign Good, we have said, and this is to say the Supreme Principle . . . Starting from the idea that man is total intelligence, free will and generous soul, we arrive at this ternary: Truth, Way and Virtue; in other words: metaphysical and cosmological doctrine, spiritual method and moral quality. “Wisdom, Strength, Beauty.” (GTUFS: RootsHC, Man in the Face of the Sovereign Good)
To say that man is made of intelligence, will and sentiment, means that he is made for the Truth, the Way, and Virtue. In other words: intelligence is made for comprehension of the True; will, for concentration on the Sovereign Good; and sentiment, for conformity to the True and the Good. Instead of “sentiment,” we could also say “soul” or “faculty of loving,” for this is a fundamental dimension of man; not a weakness as it is all too often thought, but a participation in the Divine Nature, in conformity with the mystery that “God is Love.” (GTUFS: HaveCenter, Intelligence and Character)
It is in man’s nature to be able to approach God, firstly in a direct and objective manner, secondly in an indirect but also objective manner, and thirdly in a manner that is direct and subjective: thus firstly by addressing himself to the personal God, who is outside and above us, then by addressing himself to a given human manifestation of God, and finally by finding God in the depths of his heart. This is first the transcendent God enthroned in Heaven, then the Man-God or, more generally, the Symbol and the Sacrament; and finally the immanent Self. (GTUFS: RootsHC, Man in the Face of the Sovereign Good)
Man’s only possible relationship with Beyond-Being is in pure Intellection and, in principle – Deo volente – in contemplative concentration. The relationship with Being – and it is this alone that religions have in view – is realized through prayer, the virtues, comportment; the same relationship will be realized indirectly through an Avatara, or quite generally, through a Symbol. (GTUFS: RootsHC, Man in the Face of the Sovereign Good)
To say man is to say form; man is the bridge between form and essence, or between “flesh” and “spirit”. (GTUFS: EsoterismPW, Understanding Esoterism)
Man, like the Universe, is a fabric of determination and indetermination; the latter stemming from the Infinite, and the former from the Absolute. (GTUFS: HaveCenter, Survey of Integral Anthropology)
Man is himself “made in the image of God”: only man is such a direct image, in the sense that his form is an “axial” and “ascendant” perfection and his content a totality. Man by his theomorphism is at the same time a work of art and also an artist; a work of art because he is an “image,” and an artist because this image is that of the Divine Artist. Man alone among earthly beings can think, speak and produce works; only he can contemplate and realize the Infinite. (GTUFS: LSelf, Principles and Criteria of Art)
What defines man is that of which he alone is capable: namely total intelligence – endowed with objectivity and transcendence – free will, and generous character; or quite simply objectivity, hence adequation of the will and of sentiment as well as of intelligence . . . The animal cannot leave his state, whereas man can; strictly speaking, only he who is fully man can leave the closed system of the individuality, through participation in the one and universal Selfhood. There lies the mystery of the human vocation: what man “can,” he “must”; on this plane, to be able to is to have to, given that the capacity pertains to a positive substance. Or again, which fundamentally amounts to the same thing: to know is to be; to know That which is, and That which alone is. (GTUFS: RootsHC, Pillars of Wisdom)
We have stated above that man’s prerogative is the capacity for objectivity, and that this is the fundamental criterion of human value. Strictly speaking, a man is he who “knows how to think”; whoever does not know how to think, whatever his gifts may be, is not authentically a man; that is, he is not a man in the ideal sense of the term. Too many men display intelligence as long as their thought runs in the grooves of their desires, interests and prejudices; but the moment the truth is contrary to what pleases them, their faculty of thought becomes blurred or vanishes; which is at once inhuman and “all too human.” (GTUFS: HaveCenter, Survey of Integral Anthropology)
And man is so made that his intelligence has no effective value unless it be combined with a virtuous character. Besides, no virtuous man is altogether deprived of intelligence; while the intellectual capacity of an intelligent man has no value except through truth. Intelligence and virtue are in conformity with their reason for being only through their supernatural contents or archetypes; in a word, man is not fully human unless he transcends himself, hence, in the first place, unless he masters himself. (GTUFS: HaveCenter, Survey of Integral Anthropology)
Man is like a reduced image of the cosmogonic unfolding; we are made of matter, but in the center of our being is the supra-sensible and transcendent reality, the “Kingdom of Heaven”, the “eye of the heart”, the way to the Infinite. (GTUFS: LightAW, Maya)
Man (contemporary / ancient): Contemporary man, in spite of his being marked by certain experiences due to the senescence of humanity, is spiritually soft and ineffective and intellectually ready to commit every possible betrayal, which will seem to him as summits of intelligence, whereas in reality these betrayals are far more absurd than the excesses of simplicity and emotivity of ancient man. In a general way, the man of the “last days” is a blunted creature, and the best proof of this is that the only “dynamism” of which he is still capable is that which tends downwards, and which is no more than a passivity taking advantage of cosmic gravity; it is the agitation of a man who lets himself be carried away by a torrent and who imagines that he is creating this torrent himself by his agitation. (GTUFS: SufismVQ, Ellipsis and Hyperbolism in Arab Rhetoric)
Man (noble / base): The noble man is one who masters himself and loves to master himself; the base man is one who does not master himself and shrinks in horror from mastering himself.* (* It may be added that the noble man looks at what is essential in phenomena, not at what is accidental; he sees the overall worth in a creature and the intention of the Creator – not some more or less humiliating accident – and he thereby anticipates the perception of the Divine Qualities through forms. This is what is expressed by the words of the Apostle “for the pure all things are pure”.) (GTUFS: EsoterismPW, Sincerity: What it Is and What it Is Not)
Man (noble / holy): The noble man is one who dominates himself; the holy man is one who transcends himself. (GTUFS: EsoterismPW, Dimensions of the Human Vocation)
Man (noble / vile): The noble man respects, admires and loves in virtue of an essence that he perceives, whereas the vile man underestimates or scorns in virtue of an accident; the sense of the sacred is opposed to the instinct to belittle. (GTUFS: HaveCenter, Intelligence and Character)
The noble man feels the need to admire, to venerate, to worship; the vile man on the contrary tends to belittle, even to mock, which is the way the devil sees things; but it is also diabolical to admire what is evil, whereas it is normal and praiseworthy to despise evil as such, for the truth has precedence over everything. The primacy of the true also clearly implies that essential truths have precedence over secondary truths, as the absolute has precedence over the relative. The definition of man according to immortality has precedence over the definition of man according to earthly life. (GTUFS: TransfMan, Two Visions of Things)
Man (original): 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. (GTUFS: HaveCenter, Survey of Integral Anthropology)
Man (primordial / fallen): Primordial man knew by himself that God is; fallen man does not know it; he must learn it. Primordial man was always aware of God; fallen man, while having learned that God is, must force himself to be aware of it always. Primordial man loved God more than the world; fallen man loves the world more than God, he must therefore practice renunciation. Primordial man saw God everywhere, he had the sense of archetypes and of essences and was not enclosed in the alternative “flesh or spirit”; fallen man sees God nowhere, he sees only the world as such, not as the manifestation of God. (GTUFS: RootsHC, On Intelligence)
Man (spiritual / worldly): The spiritual man is one who transcends himself and loves to transcend himself; the worldly man remains horizontal and detests the vertical dimension. (GTUFS: EsoterismPW, Sincerity: What it Is and What it Is Not)
Man (supreme function): Something must be said about the priority of contemplation. As one knows, Islam defines this supreme function of man in the hadith about ihsan which orders man to “adore Allah as though thou didst see Him,” since “if thou dost not see Him, He nonetheless seeth thee.” Christianity, from its angle, calls first for total love of God and only after this for love of the neighbor; now it must be insisted, in the interest of the first love, that this second love could not be total because love of ourselves is not so; whether ego or alter, man is not God. In any case it follows from all traditional definitions of man’s supreme function that a man capable of contemplation has no right to neglect it but is on the contrary called to dedicate himself to it; in other words, he sins neither against God nor against his neighbor – to say the least – in following the example of Mary in the gospels and not that of Martha, for contemplation contains action and not the reverse. If in point of fact action can be opposed to contemplation, it is nevertheless not opposed to it in principle, nor is action called for beyond what is necessary or required by the duties of a man’s station in life. In abasing ourselves from humility, we must not also abase things which transcend us, for then our virtue loses all its value and meaning; to reduce spirituality to a “humble” utilitarianism – thus to a disguised materialism – is to give offense to God, on the one hand because it is like saying it is not worthwhile to be overly preoccupied with God, and on the other hand because it means relegating the divine gift of intelligence to the rank of the superfluous. (GTUFS: UIslam, The Path)
“Man of Faith” / “Man of Gnosis”: It is the difference between the believer, who in all things has in view moral and mystical efficacy to the point of sometimes needlessly violating the laws of thought, and the gnostic, who lives above all from principial certitudes and who is so made that these certitudes determine his behavior and contribute powerfully to his alchemical transformation. (GTUFS: SurveyME, Confessional Speculation: Intentions and Impasses)