To say Beauty is to say Love; and it is known how important this idea of Love is in all religions and all spiritual alchemies. The reason for this is that Love is the TENDENCY towards Union: this TENDENCY can be a movement, either towards the Immutable, the Absolute, or towards the Limitless, the Infinite; on the plane of human relations, a particular love is the support for Love as such; and the love of man for woman can be compared to the liberating TENDENCY towards the Divine Infinitude — woman personifying All-Possibility — whereas the love of woman for man is comparable to the stabilizing TENDENCY towards the Divine Center, which offers all certitude and all security; however, each partner participates in the other’s position, given that each is a human being and that in this respect the sexual scission is secondary. As regards sexuality in itself, the Sufi Ibn Arabi deems sexual union to be, in the natural order, the most adequate image of Supreme Knowledge: of Extinction in Allâh of the “Knower through Allâh.” Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy
Let us come back now to the question of the “pneumatic”, quite apart from any personal application of the term: the quality of the born-gnostic involves not only modes but also degrees; there is the difference between the jnãni and the bhakta on the one hand and, on the other, differences of plenitude or breadth in the manifestation of the archetype. In any case, the pneumatic is situated, by his nature, on the vertical and timeless axis – where there is no “before” or “after” – so that the archetype which he personifies or “incarnates”, and which is his true “himself’ or “his very self’ can, at any moment, pierce through the contingent, individual envelope; it is therefore really “himself’ who is speaking. The real gnostic does not attribute any “state” to himself, for he is without ambition and without ostentation; he has a TENDENCY rather – through an “instinct for holding back” – to disguise his nature inasmuch as he has, in any case, awareness of “cosmic play” (lila) and it is hard for him to take secular and worldly persons seriously, that is to say, “horizontal” beings who are full of self-confidence and who remain, “humanists” that they are, below the vocation of man. Essays A NOTE ON RENÉ GUÉNON
There are two points to consider in created things, namely the empirical appearance and the mechanism; now the appearance manifests the divine intention, as we have stated above; the mechanism merely operates the mode of manifestation. For example, in man’s body the divine intention is expressed by its form, its deiformity, (NA: We should specify: total or integral deiformity, for in animals too there is – or can be – a deiformity, but it is partial; similarly for plants, minerals, elements and other orders of phenomena.) its symbolism and its beauty; the mechanism is its anatomy and vital functioning. The modern mentality, having always a scientific and “iconoclastic” TENDENCY, tends to overaccentuate the mechanism to the detriment of the creative intention, and does so on all levels, psychological as well as physical; the result is a jaded and “demystified” mentality that is no longer “impressed” by anything. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress
If the Westerner – “free thinker” or not – has a TENDENCY to “think for himself,” wrongly or rightly according to the case, this is due to distant causes; the Western mind expressed itself through Plato and Aristotle before having undergone the influence of Christian fideism, and even then, and from the very outset, it could not help having recourse to the Greek philosophers. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism
The purely ‘theoristic’ understanding of an idea, which we have so termed because of the limitative TENDENCY which paralyses it, may justly be characterized by the word ‘dogmatism’; religious dogma in fact, at least to the extent to which it is supposed to exclude other conceptual forms, though certainly not in itself, represents an idea considered in conformity with a ‘theoristic’ TENDENCY, and this exclusive way of looking at ideas has even become characteristic of the religious point of view as such. sophiaperennis: What is dogmatism?
A religious dogma ceases, however, to be limited in this way once it is understood in the light of its inherent truth, which is of a universal order, and this is the case in all esotericism. On the other hand, the ideas formulated in esotericism and in metaphysical doctrines generally may in their turn be understood according to the dogmatic or ‘theoristic’ TENDENCY, and the case is then analogous to that of the religious dogmatism of which we have just spoken. sophiaperennis: What is dogmatism?
Scholasticism, it should be remembered, is above all a defense against error: its aim is to be an apologetic and not, as in the case of “metaphysically operative” doctrines – gnosis or jnana – a support for meditation and contemplation. Before Scholasticism, Greek philosophy had also aimed to satisfy a certain need for causal explanations rather than to furnish the intelligence with a means of realization; moreover, the disinterested character of truth easily becomes, on the level of speculative logic, a TENDENCY towards “art for art’s sake,” whence the ventosa loquacitas philosophorum stigmatized by Saint Bernard. sophiaperennis: Scholasticism
From the standpoint of integral rationalism, Aristotle has been reproached with stopping halfway and thus being in contradiction with his own principle of knowledge; but this accusation stems entirely from an abusive exploitation of Aristotelian logic, and is the product of a thinking that is artificial to the point of perversion. To Aristotle’s implicit axioms, which his detractors are incapable of perceiving, they oppose a logical automatism which the Stagirite would have been the first to repudiate. If Aristotle is to be blamed it is for the quite contrary reason that his formulation of metaphysics is governed by a TENDENCY toward exteriorization, a TENDENCY which is contrary to the very essence of all metaphysics. Aristotelianism is a science of the Inward expanding toward the outward and thereby tends to favor exteriorization, whereas traditional metaphysics is invariably formulated in view of an interiorization, and for this reason does not encourage the expansion of the natural sciences, or not to an excessive extent. It is this flaw in Aristotelianism that explains the superficiality of its method of knowledge, which was inherited by Thomism and exploited by it as a religious pretext to limit the intellective faculty, despite the latter being capable in principle both of absoluteness and hence also of reaching out to the supernatural; the same defect also explains the corresponding mediocrity of Aristotelian ethics, not to mention the scientism which proves Aristotle’s deviation from the epistemological principle. The important point to retain here is that the Monotheists, whether Semite or Semitized, could not have incorporated Aristotle in their teachings if he had been exclusively a rationalist; but in incorporating him they nonetheless became poisoned, and the partial or virtual rationalism – or rationalism in principle – which resulted has finally given rise to totalitarian rationalism, systematic and self-satisfied, and consequently shut off from every element that is subjectively or objectively suprarational. (NA: It might seem surprising that Scholasticism chose Aristotle and not Plato or Plotinus, hut the reason for this is plain, since from the viewpoint of objective faith there is everything to be gained by promoting a wisdom that offers no competition, and which makes it possible, on the one hand, to neutralize that interloper Intellection, and, on the other, to give carte blanche to any theological contradictions that may occur by describing them as “mysteries.”) The Aristotelian Pandora’s box is scientism coupled with sensationalism; it is through these concepts that Aristotle deviates from Plato by replacing the interiorizing TENDENCY with its inverse. People say that the Church has kept science in chains; what is certain is that the modern world has unchained it with the result that it has escaped from all control, and, in the process of destroying nature, is headed toward the destruction of mankind. For genuine Christianity, as for every other traditional perspective, the world is what it appears to be to our empirical vision and there is no good reason for it to be anything else; herein lies the real significance, on the one hand, of the naïveté of the Scriptures, and, on the other, of the trial of Galileo. To try and pierce the wall of collective, normal, millenary experience is to eat of the forbidden fruit, leading fatally to the loss of essential knowledge and earthly equilibrium through the euphoria engendered by a completely unrealistic autodivinization of man. sophiaperennis: Aristotle
A man such as Aristotle provides a classic example of a qualification that is exclusively intellectual and, by this very fact, unilateral and necessarily limited, even on the level of his genius, since perfect intellection ipso facto involves contemplation and interiorization. In the case of the Stagirite, the intelligence is penetrating but the TENDENCY of the will is exteriorizing, in conformity moreover with the cosmolatry of the majority of the Greeks; it is this that enabled Saint Thomas to support the religious thesis regarding the “natural” character of the intelligence, so called because it is neither revealed nor sacramental, and the reduction of intelligence to reason illumined by faith, the latter alone being granted the right to be “supernatural.” Not that Saint Thomas thereby excluded direct intellection, which would indeed have been impossible for him, but he enclosed it to all intents and purposes within dogmatic and rational limits, whence the paradox of an interiorizing contemplativity armed with an exteriorizing logic. sophiaperennis: Aristotle
The sacred rights of the Intellect appear besides in the fact that Christians have not been able to dispense with the wisdom of Plato, and that later, the Latins found the need for recourse to Aristotelianism, as if thereby recognising that religio could not do without the element of wisdom, which a too exclusive perspective of love had allowed to fall into discredit. (NA: The ancient TENDENCY to reduce sophie to a ‘philosophy’, an ‘art for art’s sake’ or a ‘knowledge without love’, hence a pseudo-wisdom, has necessitated the predominance, in Christianity, of the contrary viewpoint. Love, in the sapiential perspective, is the element which surpasses simple ratiocination and makes knowledge effective; this cannot be insisted on too much.) But if knowledge is a profound need of the human spirit, it is by that very fact also a way. sophiaperennis: Platonism and Christianity
One of the great errors of our times is to speak of the “bankruptcy” of religion or the religions; this is to lay blame on truth for our own refusal to admit it; and by the same token it is to deny man both liberty and intelligence. Intelligence depends in large measure on the will, hence on free will, in the sense that free will can contribute towards actualizing intelligence or on the contrary paralyzing it. It was not without reason that medieval theologians located heresy in the will: intelligence can, in fact, fall into error, but its nature does not allow it to resist truth indefinitely; for this to happen it needs the intervention of a factor connected with the will, or, more precisely, with the passions, namely prejudice, sentimental bias, individualism in all its forms. There is, at the basis of every error, an element of irrational “mystique,” a TENDENCY not deriving from concepts, but making use of them or producing them: behind every limiting or subversive philosophy can be discerned a “taste” or a “color”; errors proceed from “hardenings,” drynesses or intoxications. sophiaperennis: Philosophy and modern times
We do not think we are going too far in saying that the necessity for a dogmatic faith answers to a collective TENDENCY to deny the supernatural in accordance with a mentality which is more passional than contemplative and thereby riveted to “bare facts,” whence a philosophy which makes deductions from the sensory to the Universal, instead of starting from the latter in order to understand the former; it is not a question here of passion as such, which is a general human fact, but of its intrusion into the field of the intelligence. sophiaperennis: Rationalism
But there is something else: the notion of naturalism is rather loose because it expresses not only an excess but also a TENDENCY that is legitimate and on the whole logical: when a work imitates nature by observing certain principles, that is, by insisting upon what is essential and not what is merely accidental, (NA: In addition, the work ought to conform to the material utilized by the artist, and also – in the case of painting – to the rules required by the flat surface, and other conditions of the kind.) it may be called naturalistic without this term having to evoke the faults of total naturalism. The work of art is then valid, not because it copies nature, but because it does so in a certain manner. sophiaperennis: ART, ITS DUTIES AND ITS RIGHTS
Independently of any question of naturalism, it frequently happens in modern art – as in literature – that the author wishes to say too much: exteriorization is pushed too far, as if nothing should remain within. This TENDENCY appears in all modern arts, including poetry and music; here again, what is lacking is the instinct of sacrifice, sobriety, restraint; the creator completely empties himself, and in so doing, he invites others to empty themselves as well and thereby to lose all the essential, namely the taste for the secret and the sense of inwardness, whereas the work’s reason for being is contemplative and unitive interiorization. sophiaperennis: ART, ITS DUTIES AND ITS RIGHTS
Besides the icons of Christ and the Virgin, there are also a multitude of other hieratic images, relating the facts of sacred history and the lives of the saints; likewise in Buddhist iconography, after the central images come the numerous representations of secondary personifications; it is this more or less peripheral category which may be called indirect sacred art, even though there may not always be a rigorous line of demarcation between it and direct or central sacred art. The function of this ramification – apart from its didactic significance – is to enable the spirit of the central images to shine through a diverse imagery which rivets the movement of the mind by infusing into it the radiance of the Immutable, and which, in so doing, imposes on the moving soul a TENDENCY towards interiorization; this function is thus entirely analogous to that of hagiography or even to that of tales of chivalry, not forgetting fairy stories whose symbolism, as is well known, belongs to the realm of the spiritual and so to that of the sacred. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART
Sacred art is far from always being perfect, although it is necessarily so in its principles and in the best of its productions; nevertheless in the great majority of imperfect works, the principles compensate for the accidental weaknesses, rather as gold, from a certain point of view, can compensate for the but slight artistic value of a given object. Two pitfalls lie in wait for sacred art and for traditional art in general: a virtuosity tending towards the outward and the superficial, and a conventionalism without intelligence and without soul; but this, it must be stressed, rarely deprives sacred art of its overall efficacy, and in particular of its capacity to create a stabilizing and interiorizing atmosphere. As for imperfection, one of its causes can be the inexperience, if not the incompetence of the artist; the most primitive works are rarely the most perfect, for in the history of art there are periods of apprenticeship just as later there are periods of decadence, the latter often being due to virtuosity. Another cause of imperfection is unintelligence, either individual or collective: the image may be lacking in quality because the artist – the word here having an approximate meaning – is lacking in intelligence or spirituality, but it may likewise bear the imprint of a certain collective unintelligence that comes from the sentimental conventionalization of the common religion; in this case, the collective psychism clothes the spiritual element with a kind of “pious stupidity”, for if there is a naïveté that is charming, there is also a naiveté that is moralistic and irritating. This must be said lest anyone should think that artistic expressions of the sacred dispense us from discernment and oblige us to be prejudiced, and so that no one should forget that in the traditional domain in general, there is on all planes a constant struggle between a solidifying TENDENCY and a TENDENCY towards transparency which draws the psychic back to the spiritual. All of this may be summed up by saying that sacred art is sacred in itself, but that it is not necessarily so in all its expressions. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART
The two Hindu notions of darshan and satsanga sum up, by extension, the question of human ambience as such, and so also that of art or craftsmanship. Darshan, is above all the contemplation of a saint, or of a man invested with a priestly or princely authority, and recognizable by the vestimentary or other symbols which manifest it; satsanga is the frequentation of holy men, or simply men of spiritual TENDENCY. What is true for our living surroundings is likewise true for our inanimate surroundings, whose message or perfume we unconsciously assimilate to some degree or another. “Tell ME whom thou frequentest and I shall tell thee who thou art.” sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART
In order to forestall any possible objection, we would stress the fact that in intellectually healthy civilizations – the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages for instance – spirituality often affirms itself by a marked indifference to forms, and sometimes even reveals a TENDENCY to turn away from them, as is shown by the example of St. Bernard when he condemned images in monasteries, which, it must be said, in no wise signifies the acceptance of ugliness and barbarism, any more than poverty implies the possession of things that are mean in themselves. But in a world where traditional art is dead, where consequently form itself is invaded by everything which is contrary to spirituality and where nearly every formal expression is corrupted at its very roots, the traditional regularity of forms takes on a very special spiritual importance which it could not have possessed at the beginning, since the absence of the spirit in forms was then inconceivable. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART
The monks of the eighth century, very different from those religious authorities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who betrayed Christian art by abandoning it to the impure passions of worldly men and the ignorant imagination of the profane, were fully conscious of the holiness of every kind of means able to express the Tradition. They stipulated, at the second council of Nicaea, that ‘art’ (i.e. ‘the perfection of work’) alone belongs to the painter, while ordinance (the choice of the subject) and disposition (the treatment of the subject from the symbolical as well as the technical or material points of view) belongs to the Fathers. (Non est pictoris – ejus enim sola ars est-rerum ordinatio et dispositio Patrum nostrorum.) This amounts to placing all artistic initiative under the direct and active authority of the spiritual leaders of Christianity. Such being the case, how can one explain the fact that during recent centuries, religious circles have for the most part shown such a regret table lack of understanding in respect of all those things which, having an artistic character, are, as they fondly believe, only external matters? First of all, admitting a priori the elimination of every esoteric influence, there is the fact that a religious perspective as such has a TENDENCY to identify itself with the moral point of view, which stresses merit only and believes it is neces sary to ignore the sanctifying quality of intellectual knowledge and, as a result, the value of the supports of such knowledge; now, the perfection of sensible forms is no more ‘meritorious in the moral sense than the intellections which those forms reflect and transmit, and it is therefore only logical that symbolic forms, when they are no longer understood, should be relegated to the background, and even forsaken, in order to be replaced by forms which will no longer appeal to the intelligence, but only to a sentimental imagination capable of inspiring the meritorious act – at least such is the belief of the man of limited intelligence. However, this sort of speculative provocation of reactions by resorting to means of a superficial and vulgar nature will, in the last analysis, prove to be illusory, for, in reality, nothing can be better fitted to influence the deeper dispositions of the soul than sacred art. Profane art, on the contrary, even if it be of some psychological value in the case of souls of inferior intelligence, soon exhausts its means, by the very fact of their superficiality and vulgarity, after which it can only provoke reactions of contempt; these are only too common, and may be considered as a ‘rebound’ of the contempt in which sacred art was held by profane art, especially in its earlier stages. (NA: In the same way, the hostility of the representatives of exotericism for all that lies beyond their comprehension results in an increasingly ‘massive’ exotericism which cannot but suffer from ‘rifts’; but the ‘spiritual porousness’ of Tradition – that is to say the immanence in the ‘substance’ of exotericism of a transcendent ‘dimension’ which makes up for its ‘massiveness,’- this state of ‘porousness’ having been lost, the above-mentioned ‘rifts’ could only be produced from below; which means the replacement of the masters of medieval esotericism by the protagonists of modern unbelief.) It has been a matter of current experience that nothing is able to offer to irreligion a more immediately tangible nourishment than the insipid hypocrisy of religious images; that which was meant to stimulate piety in the believer, but serves to confirm unbelievers in their impiety, whereas it must be recognized that genuinely sacred art does not possess this character of a ‘two-edged weapon’, for being itself more abstract, it offers less hold to hostile psychological reactions. Now, no matter what may be the theories that attribute to the people the need for unintelligent images, warped in their essence, the elites do exist and certainly require something different; what they demand is an art corresponding to their own spirit and in which their soul can come to rest, finding itself again in order to mount to the Divine. Such an art cannot spring simply from profane taste, nor even from ‘genius’, but must proceed essentially out of Tradition; this fact being admitted, the masterpiece must be executed by a sanctified artist or, let us say, by one in a state of grace’. (NA: The icon-painters were monks who, before setting to work, prepared themselves by fasting, prayer, confession and communion; it even happened that the colours were mixed with holy water and the dust from relics, as would not have been possible had the icon not possessed a really sacramental character.) Far from serving only for the more or less superficial instruction and edification of the masses, the icon, as is the case with the Hindu yantra and all other visible symbols, establishes a bridge from the sensible to the spiritual: ‘By the visible aspect’, states St. John Damascenus, ‘our thoughts must be drawn up in a spiritual flight and rise to the invisible majesty of God.’ sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART
But let us return to the errors of naturalism. Art, as soon as it is no longer determined, illuminated and guided by spirituality, lies at the mercy of the individual and purely psychical resources of the artist, and these resources must soon run out, if only because of the very platitude of the naturalistic principle which calls only for a superficial tracing of Nature. Reaching the dead-point of its own platitude, naturalism inevitably engendered the monstrosities of ‘surrealism’, The latter is but the decomposing body of an art, and in any case should rather be called ‘infra-realism’; it is properly speaking the satanic consequence of naturalistic luciferianism. Naturalism, as a matter of fact, is clearly luciferian in its wish to imitate the creations of God, not to mention its affirmation of the psychical element to the detriment of the spiritual, of the individual to the detriment of the universal, of the bare fact to the detriment of the symbol. Normally, man must imitate the creative act, not the thing created; that is what is done by symbolic art, and the results are ‘creations’ which are not would-be duplications of those of God, but rather a reflection of them according to a real analogy, revealing the transcendental aspects of things; and this revelation is the only sufficient reason of art, apart from any practical uses such and such objects may serve. There is here a metaphysical inversion of relation which we have already pointed out: for God, His creature is a reflection or an ‘exteriorized’ aspect of Himself; for the artist, on the contrary, the work is a reflection of an inner reality of which he himself is only an outward aspect; God creates His own image, while man, so to speak, fashions his own essence, at least symbolically. On the principial plane, the inner manifests the outer, but on the manifested plane, the outer fashions the inner, and a sufficient reason for all traditional art, no matter of what kind, is the fact that in a certain sense the work is greater than the artist himself and brings back the latter, through the mystery of artistic creation, to the proximity of his own Divine Essence. (NA: This explains the danger, so far as Semitic peoples are concerned, that lies in the painting and especially in the carving of living things. Where the Hindu and the inhabitant of the Far East adores a Divine reality through a symbol – and we know that a symbol is truly what it symbolizes as far as its essential reality is concerned – the Semite will display a TENDENCY to deify the symbol itself; one of the reasons for the prohibition of plastic and pictorial arts amongst the Semitic peoples was certainly a wish to prevent naturalistic deviations, a very real danger among men whose mentality demanded a Tradition religious in form.) sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART
Hindu art has in it both something of the heavy motion of the sea and at the same time something of the exuberance of virgin forest; it is sumptuous, sensual and rhythmical; intimately linked with dancing, it seems to originate in the cosmic dance of the Gods. In certain respects the Tamil style is heavier and more static than that of the Aryan Hindus of northern India. Islamic art is abstract, but also poetical and gracious; it is woven out of sobriety and splendour. The style of the Maghreb is perhaps more virile than are the Turkish and Persian styles; but these – and especially the latter – are by way of compensation more varied. Within the field of Chinese art, which is rich, powerful and full of the unexpected and the mysterious, the Japanese style represents a TENDENCY towards soberness and elegance. The Tibetan style is midway between that of the Chinese and the Hindus and is heavy, sombre, at times rough and often fierce; the Burmese and Siamese style is delicate, lively and precious. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
The modern cult of work is founded on the one hand on the fact that work is a necessity for the majority of men, and on the other hand on the human TENDENCY to make a virtue of an unavoidable constraint. The Bible, however, presents work as a sort of punishment: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”; prior to the original sin and the Fall, the first human pair knew no work. sophiaperennis: THE SPIRITUAL MEANING OF WORK
It happens frequently that anglicized Hindus, as also other Asiatics, mention in the same breath names like Jesus and Gandhi, Shankara and Kierkegaard, Buddha and Goethe, the Holy Virgin and Mrs. X, or affirm that such and such a German musician was a yogi or that the French Revolution was a mystical movement, etc. This fact reveals a total ignorance of certain differences of category which are none the less of capital importance — we would readily say differences of ‘reality’ — as well as a strange lack of sensibility; it also shows a TENDENCY to simplification, due doubtless to the more or less unconscious idea that only ‘realization’ counts and not ‘theory’, whence a completely misplaced and profitless contempt for the objective discerning of phenomena… A typical example of neo-Hindu deviation is the Swami Yogananda, founder in the United States of a “Self-Realisation Fellowship'(SRF!), the president (!) of which is — or was — an American woman. On the other hand we find the ‘discerning of spirits’ present to an eminent degree in a man like (Ananda) Coomaraswamy, and we are not alone in hoping that his influence will grow in his own country. (Gnosis Divine Wisdom, p. 57-58, note 1). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism
What we term “psychological imposture” is the TENDENCY to reduce everything to psychological factors and to call in question not only what is intellectual or spiritual — the first being related to truth and the second to life in and by truth — but also the human spirit as such, and therewith its capacity of adequation and, still more evidently, its inward illimitation and transcendence. The same belittling and truly subversive TENDENCY rages in all the domains that ‘scientism’ claims to embrace, but its most acute expression is beyond all doubt to be found in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is at once an endpoint and a cause, as is always the case with profane ideologies, like materialism and evolutionism, of which it is really a logical and fatal ramification and a natural ally. (Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, p. 195 Chapter: The psychological Imposture). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism