To return to what was said above about the understanding of ideas, a theoretical notion may be compared to the view of an object. Just as this view does not reveal all possible aspects, or in other words the integral nature of the object, the perfect knowledge of which would be nothing less than identity with it, so a theoretical notion does not itself correspond to the integral truth, of which it necessarily suggests only one aspect, essential or otherwise. (NA: In a treatise directed against rationalist philosophy, El-Ghazzâli speaks of certain blind men who, not having even a theoretical knowledge of an elephant, came across this animal one day and started to feel the different parts of its body; as a result each man represented the animal to himsel f according to the limb which he touched: for the first, who touched a foot, the elephant resembled a column, whereas for the second, who touched one of the tusks, it resembled a stake, and so on. By this parable El-Ghazzâli seeks to show the error involved in trying to enclose the universal within a fragment ary notion of it, or within isolated and exclusive ‘aspects’ or ‘points of view’. Shri Ramakrishna also uses this parable to demonstrate the inadequacy of dogmatic exclusiveness in its negative aspect. The same idea could however be expressed by means of an even more adequate example: faced with any object, some might say that it ‘is’ a certain shape, while others might say that it ‘is’ such and such a material; others again might maintain that it ‘is’ such and such a number or such and such a weight and so forth. 2. The Angels are intelligences which are limited to a particular ‘aspect’ of Divinity; consequently an angelic state is a sort of transcendent ‘point of view’. On a lower plane, the ‘intellectuality’ of animals and of the more peripheral species of the terrestrial state, that of plants for example, corresponds cosmologically to the angelic intellectuality: what differentiates one vegetable species from another is in reality simply the mode of its ‘intelligence’; in other words, it is the form or rather the integral nature of a plant which reveals the state – eminently passive of course – of CONTEMPLATION or knowledge of its species; we say ‘of its species’ advisedly, because, considered in isolation, a plant does not constitute an individual. We would recall here that the Intellect, being universal, must be discoverable in everything that exists, to whatever order it belongs; the same is not true of reason, which is only a specifi cally human faculty and is in no way identical with intelligence, either our own or that of other beings.) 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
It follows from the above that in speculative doctrines it is the ‘point of view’ on the one hand and the ‘aspect’ on the other hand which determine the form of the affirmation, whereas in dogmatism the affirmation is confused with a determinate point of view and aspect, thus excluding all others. (NA: The Angels are intelligences which are limited to a particular ‘aspect’ of Divinity; consequently an angelic state is a sort of transcendent ‘point of view’. On a lower plane, the ‘intellectuality’ of animals and of the more peripheral species of the terrestrial state, that of plants for example, corresponds cosmologically to the angelic intellectuality: what differentiates one vegetable species from another is in reality simply the mode of its ‘intelligence’; in other words, it is the form or rather the integral nature of a plant which reveals the state – eminently passive of course – of CONTEMPLATION or knowledge of its species; we say ‘of its species’ advisedly, because, considered in isolation, a plant does not constitute an individual. We would recall here that the Intellect, being universal, must be discoverable in everything that exists, to whatever order it belongs; the same is not true of reason, which is only a specifi cally human faculty and is in no way identical with intelligence, either our own or that of other beings.) sophiaperennis: What is the understanding of an idea?
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
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
What good, for example, is Schelling’s correct view of intellectual CONTEMPLATION and of the transcending of the subject-object relationship in the Absolute, since it is accompanied by the promise of a flat philosophical pseudo-religion mingled with a classical or academic aestheticism of the most banal style? The replacing of the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum by the formula of Maine de Biran: “I act, I will, I exist,” or the Sum cogitans of Heidegger, and so on, is strictly a matter of taste, or of mental illusion; the starting point in all cases of this kind is at bottom merely an ignorance ignorant of itsel f. It may well be asked why thought or action are any better proof of our existence than some sensation or other; it is precisely the intelligence which shows us that many things exist without thinking, acting or willing, for once we see that stones exist, we have no need to invoke thought or action as proofs of our own existence, provided, of course, we admit that we are certain of the objective value of our vision. Now we are certain of it by virtue of the infallibility of the Intellect, and that is a subject which admits of no discussion, any more than does the question of knowing whether we are sane or mad. Philosophers readily found their systems on the absence of this certitude, which is however the conditio sine qua non of all knowledge, and even of all thought and all action. sophiaperennis: Descartes and the Cogito
Exoterically, beauty represents either an excusable or an inexcusable pleasure, or an expression of piety and thereby the expression of a theological symbolism; esoterically, it has the role of a spiritual means in connection with CONTEMPLATION and interiorizing “remembrance”. By “integral aesthetics” we mean in fact a science that takes account not only of sensible beauty but also of the spiritual foundations of this beauty, (NA: One must not confuse aesthetics with aestheticism: the second term, used to describe a literary and artistic movement in England in the 19th century, means in general an excessive preoccupation with aesthetic values real or imaginary, or at any rate very relative. However, one must not too readily cast aspersions upon romantic aesthetes, who had the merit of a nostalgia that was very understandable in a world that was sinking into a hopeless mediocrity and a cold and inhuman ugliness.) these foundations explaining the frequent connection between the arts and initiatic methods. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS
Within the framework of a traditional civilization, there is without doubt a distinction to be made between sacred art and profane art. The purpose of the first is to communicate, on the one hand, spiritual truths and, on the other hand, a celestial presence; sacerdotal art has in principle a truly sacramental function. The function of profane art is obviously more modest: it consists in providing what theologians call “sensible consolations”, with a view to an equilibrium conducive to the spiritual life, rather in the manner of the flowers and birds in a garden. The purpose of art of every kind – and this includes craftsmanship – is to create a climate and forge a mentality; it thus rejoins, directly or indirectly, the function of interiorizing CONTEMPLATION, the Hindu darshan: CONTEMPLATION of a holy man, of a sacred place, of a venerable object, of a Divine image. (NA: When one compares the blustering and heavily carnal paintings of a Rubens with noble, correct and profound works such as the profile of Giovanna Tornabuoni by Ghirlandaio or the screens with plum-trees by Korin, one may wonder whether the term ” profane art” can serve as a common denominator for productions that are so fundamentally different. In the case of noble works impregnated with contemplative spirit one would prefer to speak of ” extra-liturgical art”, without having to specify whether it is profane or not, or to what extent it is. Moreover one must distinguish between normal profane art and a profane art which is deviated and which has thereby ceased to be a term of comparison.) sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART
The 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
St Louis, or any other Christian prince of his time, could figure amongst the kings and queens – in the form of columns – of the cathedral of Chartres; the later kings – those more marked by an invading worldliness – would be unthinkable as sacred statues. (NA: The column statues of Chartres have, like an iconostasis, the value of a criterion of formal orthodoxy: no exhibition of individualism or of profanity could find a place amongst them.) Not that all the princes of the Middle Ages were individually better than those of the Renaissance and later ages, but this is not the question; it is a question exclusively of demeanour and dress in so far as these are adequate manifestations of a norm that is both religious and ethnic, and thus of an ideal which allies the divine with the human. The king, like the pontiff, is not merely an official, he is also, by reason of his central position, an object of CONTEMPLATION, in the sense of the Sanskrit term darshan: to benefit from the darshan of a saint is to be penetrated by his appearance in all its unassessable aspects if not also by the symbolism of his pontifical robes, as the case may be. St Louis is one of those sovereigns who spiritually incarnate the ideal which they represent so to speak liturgically, whereas the majority of the other medieval princes represent this ideal at least in the second way which, let it be said once more, is far from being without importance from the point of view of the concrete intelligibility of the royal function, whose undertones are both earthly and heavenly. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART
Be that as it may, we should like to point out here that the chronic imbalance that characterizes Western humanity has two principal causes, the antagonism between Aryan paganism and Semitic Christianity on the one hand, and the antagonism between Latin rationality and Germanic imaginativeness on the other. (NA: From the point of view of spiritual worth, it is contemplativity that is decisive, whether it is combined with reason or with imagination, or with any kind of sensibility.) The Latin Church, with its sentimental and unrealistic idealism, has created a completely unnecessary scission between clergy and laity, whence a perpetual uneasiness on the part of the latter towards the former; it has moreover, without taking account of their needs and tastes, imposed on the Germanic peoples too many specifically Latin solutions, forgetting that a religious and cultural framework, in order to be effective, must adapt itself to the mental requirements of those on whom it is imposed. And since, in the case of Europeans, their creative gifts far exceed their contemplative gifts – the role of Christianity should have been to re-establish equilibrium by accentuating CONTEMPLATION and canalizing creativity, – the West excels in “destroying what it has worshipped”; also the history of Western civilization is made up of cultural treacheries that are difficult to understand, – one is astonished at so much lack of understanding, ingratitude and blindness, – and these treacheries appear most visibly, it goes without saying, in their formal manifestations, in other words, in the human ambience which, in normal conditions, ought to suggest a sort of earthly Paradise or heavenly Jerusalem, with all their beatific symbolism and stability. The Renaissance, at its apogee, replaces happiness with pride; the baroque reacts against this pride or this crushing coldness with a false happiness, cut off from its divine roots and full of a bragadoccio that is both exaggerated and frenzied. The reaction to this reaction was a pagan classicism leading to the bourgeois ugliness, both crude and mediocre, of the 19th century; this has nothing to do with the real people or with a popular craftsmanship that is still authentic, and which remains more or less on the margin of history and bears witness to a wholesomeness very far from all civilizationist affectation. (NA: Popular art moreover is often the vehicle of primordial, especially solar, symbols, and one finds it in peoples very far removed from one another, sometimes in forms that are identical down to the last detail.) sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART
Philosophers with justice define beauty as the harmony of diversity, and they properly distinguish beauty of form from beauty of expression, as well as the beauty of art from the beauty of nature; similarly, it has been very justly said that the beautiful is distinguished from the useful by the fact that it has no objective outside itself or outside the CONTEMPLATION of which it is the object, and also that the beautiful is distinguished from the agreeable by the fact that its effect surpasses mere pleasure; and finally that it is distinguished from truth by the fact that it is grasped by immediate CONTEMPLATION and not by discursive thought. (NA: Truth in the current sense of the word, that of a concordance between a state of fact and our consciousness, is indeed situated on the plane of thought, or at least it applies a priori to that plane. As for pure Intellection, its object is ” reality” of which ” truth” is the conceptual clothing. But in practice the terms ” reality” and “truth” usually merge into one another.) sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty
Beauty and goodness, as we have seen, are two faces of one and the same reality, outward the one and inward the other, at least when those words are understood in their most ordinary sense. From another point of view, however, goodness and beauty are situated on the same level, their inward face then being Beatitude; and Beatitude is inseparable from the knowledge of God. “Extremes meet”: it is therefore understandable that the notion of beauty, which is attached a priori to the appearance or the outwardness of things, reveals for that very reason a profound aspect of that which is situated at the antipodes of appearances. In a certain sense, beauty reflects a more profound reality than does goodness, in that it is disinterested and serene like the nature of things, and without objective, like Being or the Infinite. It fleets that inward release, that detachment, that sort of gentle grandeur that is proper to CONTEMPLATION, and so to wisdom and to truth. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty
To speak of “interior Beauty” is not a contradiction in terms. It means that the accent is placed on the existential and contemplative aspect of the virtues and at the same time on their metaphysical transparency; it underlines their attachment to their Divine Source, which by reverberation invests them with the quality of being an “end in themselves,” or of majesty; and it is because the beautiful has this quality that it relaxes and liberates. Beauty is inferior to goodness as the outward is inferior to the inward, but it is superior to goodness as “being” is superior to “doing,” or as CONTEMPLATION is superior to action; it is in this sense that the Beauty of God appears as a mystery even more profound than His Mercy. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty
Sensible forms therefore correspond with exactness to intellections, and it is for this reason that traditional art has rules which apply the cosmic laws and universal principles to the domain of forms, and which, beneath their more general outward aspect, reveal the ‘style’ of the civilization under consideration, this ‘style’ in its turn rendering explicit the form of intellectuality of that civilization. When art ceases to be traditional and becomes human, individual, and therefore arbitrary, that is infallibly the sign – and secondarily the cause – of an intellectual decline, a weakening, which, in the sight of those who know how to ‘discriminate between the spirits’ and who look upon things with an unprejudiced eye, is expressed by the more or less incoherent and spiritually insignificant, we would go even as far as to say unintelligible character of the forms. (NA: We are referring here to the decadence of certain branches of religious art during the Gothic period, especially in its latter part, and to Western art as a whole from the Renaissance onward: Christian art (architecture, sculpture, painting, liturgical goldsmithery, etc.), which formerly was sacred, symbolical, spiritual, had to give way before the invasion of neo-antique and naturalistic, individualistic and sentimental art; this art, which contained absolutely nothing ‘miraculous’- no matter what those who believe in the ‘Greek miracle’ may care to think – is quite unfitted for the transmission of intellectual intuitions and no longer even answers to collective psychic aspirations; it is thus as far removed as can be from intellectual CONTEMPLATION and takes into consideration feelings only; on the other hand, feeling lowers itself in proportion as it fulfils the needs of the masses, until it finishes up in a sickly and pathetic vulgarity. It is strange that no one has understood to what a degree this barbarism of forms, which reached a zenith of empty and miserable exhibitionism in the period of Louis XV, contributed – and still contributes – to driving many souls (and by no means the worst) away from the Church; they feel literally choked in surroundings which do not allow their intelligence room to breathe. Let us note in passing that the historical connection between the new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome – of the Renaissance period, therefore anti-spiritual and rhetorical, ‘human’ if so preferred – and the origin of the Reformation are unfortunately very far from fortuitous.) sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART
The majority of moderns who claim to understand art are convinced that Byzantine or Romanesque art is in no way superior to modern art, and that a Byzantine or Romanesque Virgin resembles Mary no more than do her naturalistic images, in fact rather the contrary. The answer is, however, quite simple: the Byzantine Virgin – which traditionally goes back to Saint Luke and the Angels – is infinitely closer to the ‘truth’ of Mary than a naturalistic image, which of necessity is always that of another woman. Only one of two things is possible: either the artist presents an absolutely correct portrait of the Virgin from a physical point of view, in which case it will be necessary for the artist to have seen the Virgin, a condition which obviously cannot be fulfilled – setting aside the fact that all naturalistic painting is an abuse – or else the artist will present a perfectly adequate symbol of the Virgin, but in this case physical resemblance, without being absolutely excluded, is no longer at all in question. It is this second solution – the only one that makes sense – which is realized in icons; what they do not express by means of a physical resemblance, they express by the abstract but immediate language of symbolism, a language which is built up of precision and imponderables both together. Thus the icon, in addition to the beatific power which is inherent in it by reason of its sacramental character, transmits the holiness or inner reality of the Virgin and hence the universal reality of which the Virgin herself is an expression; in contributing both to a state of CONTEMPLATION and to a metaphysical reality, the icon becomes a support of intellection, whereas a naturalistic image transmits only the fact – apart from its obvious and inevitable lie – that Mary was a woman. It is true that in the case of a particular icon it may happen that the proportions and features are those of the living Virgin, but such a likeness, if it really came to pass, would be independent of the symbolism of the image and could only be the result of a special inspiration, no doubt an unconscious one on the part of the artist himself. Naturalistic art could moreover be legitimate up to a certain point if it was used exclusively to set on record the features of the saints, since the CONTEMPLATION of saints (the Hindu darshan) can be a very precious help in the spiritual way, owing to the fact that their outward appearance conveys, as it were, the perfume of their spirituality; but the use in this limited manner of a partial and ‘disciplined’ naturalism corresponds only to a very remote possibility. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART
And this manifestation is adequate, for a symbol is basically nothing other than the Reality it symbolizes, in so far as that Reality is limited by the particular existential level in which it ‘incarnates’. This must needs be so, for nothing is absolutely outside God; were it otherwise there would be things that were absolutely limited, absolutely imperfect, absolutely ‘other than God’ – a supposition that is metaphysically absurd. To say that the sun is God is false in so far as it implies that ‘God is the sun’; but it is equally false to pretend that the sun is only an incandescent mass and absolutely nothing else, for this would be to cut it off from its Divine Cause; it would be to deny that the effect is always something of the Cause. It is superfluous to introduce into the definition of symbolism reservations which, though they pay tribute to the absolute transcendence of the Divine Principle, are none the less foreign to a purely intellectual CONTEMPLATION of things. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
When we speak of forms in the widest sense we ought also to include colours, which equally belong to the ‘formal’ order while being independent qualities in relation to tangible forms. Religions are divergent forms that are none the less analogous – there is no analogy without divergence – but they also comprise secondary forms which, following the same visual symbolism, may be described as so many ‘colours of the spirit’. Affective and combative spiritual positions are ‘red’; CONTEMPLATION and quietude are ‘blue’; joy is ‘yellow’; pure truth is ‘white’; the inexpressible is ‘black’. Colours also have, of course, many other meanings according to the degree of reality or the category of things envisaged. Let us now consider colours in their own nature and in their immediate language. Red has intensity and violence; blue has depth and goodness. (NA: The sky is blue and so is the mantle of the Virgin, Mater miserieordiae. Christ is clad in white and red; sanctity and life, purity and love. Certain Vishnuite schools distinguish between a love that is ‘red’ and a love that is ‘blue’, the former no doubt corresponding to an activity and the latter to a passivity.) The eyes can move and lose themselves in blue, but not in red, which rises before us like a wall of fire. Yellow has both intensity and depth, but in a ‘light’ mode; it possesses a certain ‘transcendent’ quality in relation to the ‘heavy’ colours and marks, as it were, an emergence towards whiteness. When mixed with blue, it gives to the contemplativity associated with this colour a quality of ‘hope’, of saving joy, and a liberation out of the enveloping quietude of CONTEMPLATION. Red excites, awakens and ‘exteriorizes’, blue gathers and ‘interiorizes’ and yellow rejoices and ‘delivers’. Red is aggressive and acts externally; the radiance of blue is deep and welcoming and turns inwards; that of yellow is ‘liberating’ and spreads in all directions. The mixture of self-collectedness (blue) with joy (yellow) is hope (green). Hope is opposed to passion (red) because it lives, not in the present like passion, but in the future; it is also opposed to passion in its two aspects of introspection and of joy. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
In the same order of ideas blue and yellow respectively symbolize CONTEMPLATION and grace, which are the two necessary poles of knowledge. But whereas white can be said to represent the transcendent synthesis of the opposition between red and green, the synthesis of blue and yellow is a direct one, namely green, which is a mixture, not an integration. As for white and black, these represent respectively what is ‘above colour’ and what has ‘no colour’; they are in opposition like light and darkness or like Being and nothingness. On the other hand, red is opposed to white as passion is opposed to purity, and it is opposed to black as life is opposed to death. Red and green are also earthly life and resurrection. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
One may wonder why the Hindus, and still more so the Buddhists, did not fear to furnish their sacred art with occasions for a fall, given that beauty – sexual beauty above all – invites to “let go of the prey for its shadow,” that is, to forget the transcendent content through being attached to the earthly husk. Now it is not for nothing that Buddhist art, more than any other, has given voice to the terrible aspects of cosmic manifestation, which at the very least constitutes a “reestablishing of the balance”: the spectator is warned, he cannot lose sight of the everywhere present menace of the pitiless samsâra, nor that of the Guardians of the Sanctuary. Darshan – the CONTEMPLATION of the Divine in nature or in art – quite clearly presupposes a contemplative temperament; now it is this very temperament that comprises a sufficient guarantee against the spirit of compliance and profanation. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body
If these conditions, which constitute what could be called the internal and external “logic” of the activity, are properly fulfilled, the work not only will no longer be an obstacle to the inward path, it will – 4 – even be a help. Conversely, work poorly done will always be an impediment to the path, because it does not correspond to any Divine Possibility; God is Perfection, and man – in order to approach God – must be perfect in action as well as in non-active CONTEMPLATION. (in The transfiguration of Man, World Wisdom) sophiaperennis: THE SPIRITUAL MEANING OF WORK
Modern science blithely rejects the traditional without being aware of the fact that this rejection comes up against the unlikely disproportion between the intelligence of the believers and the hypothetical absurdity of their beliefs, or also against the no less impossible disproportion between the intelligence of the Sages and the supposed absurdity of their convictions and their inmost motives. Man is intelligence, therefore wisdom and CONTEMPLATION and consequently tradition; to detach man from the latter, far from rendering him independent, is to deprive him of his human quality. (Treasures of Buddhism, p. 46). sophiaperennis: Science and Tradition