It is all too readily believed that a metaphysical text is a creation of reason because it has the form of a logical demonstration, whereas reason in this case is but the means of transmission. There are mystics who are disinterested in a text because it is logical, that is, because they believe it is necessary to transcend this plane; as if logic were a sign of ignorance or illusion, whereas it is a REFLECTION within our mind of the universal Causality. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy
We have seen above that the practice of unitive concentration proceeds from a speculative discernment that justifies and even requires it; now the supports of this concentration are infinitely diverse by reason of the complexity of man, distant REFLECTION of the Infinitude of God. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy
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
If truth is thus made to embrace ontological reality, aseity, the inxpressible, and so also the “personal” realization of the Divine, there is clearly no “total truth” on the plane of thought; but if by “truth” is understood thought insofar as it is an adequate REFLECTION, on the intellectual plane, of “being,” there is a “total truth” on this plane, but on condition firstly that nothing quantitative is envisaged in this totality, and secondly that it is made clear that this totality can have a relative sense, according to the order of thought to which it belongs. sophiaperennis: What is the intellect and Intellection?
In the Middle Ages there were still only two or three types of greatness: the saint and the hero, and also the sage; and then on a lesser scale and as it were by REFLECTION, the pontiff and the prince; as for the “genius” and the “artist”, those glories of the Lay universe, their like was not yet born. sophiaperennis: Jacques Maritain
Reflection, like intellection, is an activity of the intelligence, with the difference that in the second case this activity springs from that immanent divine spark that is the Intellect, whereas in the first case the activity starts from the reason, which is capable only of logic and not of intellective intuition. The conditio sine qua non of REFLECTION is that man reason on the basis of data that are both necessary and sufficient and with a view to a conclusion, (NA: It is precisely the absence of such data that makes modern science aberrant from the speculative point of view, and hypertrophied from the practical point of view; likewise for philosophy: criticism, existentialism, evolutionism, have their respective points of departure in the absence of a datum which in itself is as obvious as it is essential.) the latter being the reason for the existence of the mental operation. sophiaperennis: Reason and Intellection
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 idea of the absurdity both of the world and of man, supposing this to be true, would remain inaccessible to us; in other words, if modern man is so intelligent, ancient man cannot have been so stupid. Much more is implied in this simple REFLECTION than might appear at first sight. Consequently, before putting aside the mystical or experimental proof as unacceptable from the outset, one should not forget to ask oneself what kind of men have invoked it. There can be no common measure between the intellectual and moral worth of the greatest of the contemplatives and the absurdity that their illusion would imply, were it nothing but that. sophiaperennis: Kantianism
The truth of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum is, not that it presents thought as the proof of Being, but simply that it enunciates the primacy of thought – hence of consciousness or of intelligence – in relation to the material world which surrounds us; certainly, it is not our personal thought which preceded the world, but it was – or is – absolute Consciousness, of which our thought is precisely a distant REFLECTION; our thought which reminds us – and proves to us – that in the beginning was the Spirit. Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be. sophiaperennis: Descartes and the Cogito
It is worth pausing over this question of doctrinal proofs a little longer: firstly, a distinction must be made between rational or logical proof and intellectual or symbolic proof; the first is fallible to the extent that the propositions of the syllogism may be false, and the likelihood of this will increase with the loftiness of the order of reality; the second on the contrary depends on premises which cannot but be exact, since they identify with the very nature of things, or, to put it more clearly, since they are not other than the realities whose “proof” will be like a REFLECTION and which therefore can reveal their evidence, precisely. The spiritual or symbolic proof– which we may also term “ontological” so as to distinguish it from the simply “logical” proof–thus depends on a direct knowledge which, as such, is exact by definition, and it serves not to conclude from the known to the unknown, but to become aware of the unknown with the help of the known: consequently the link between the two will not be a rational operation, but intellectual intuition, even though reasoning, being natural to man, may obviously play a role of provisional support of occasional cause. sophiaperennis: Rationalism
Beauty, being essentially a deployment, is an “exteriorization,” even in divinis, where the unfathomable mystery of the Self is “deployed” in Being, which in its turn is deployed in Existence; Being and Existence, Ishvara and Samsâra, are both Mâyâ, but Being is still God, whereas Existence is already the world. All terrestrial beauty is thus by REFLECTION a mystery of love. It is, “whether it likes it or not,” coagulated love or music turned to crystal, but it retains on its face the imprint of its internal fluidity, of its beatitude and of its liberality; it is measure in overflowing, in it is neither dissipation nor constriction. Human beings are rarely identified with their beauty, which is lent to them and moves across them like a ray of light. Only the Avatara is a priori himself that ray, he “is” the beauty that he manifests corporeally, and that beauty is Beauty as such, the only Beauty there is. (NA: When the psalmist sings: “Thou art fairer than the children of men” (Psalms, XLV, 2), these words cannot but be applicable to the body of Christ. So also in regard to the Blessed Virgin: “Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair.” “Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.” (The Song of Solomon, 1, 15 and IV, 7).) sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty
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
The REFLECTION of the supra-formal in the formal is not the formless but on the contrary strict form. The supra-formal is incarnated in forms that are both ‘logical’ and ‘generous’ and thus in beauty. (NA: This is why every ‘descent from Heaven’, every Avatara, has perfect beauty. It is said of the Buddhas that they save not only by doctrine but also in a more direct and plastic’ way by their superhuman beauty. The name Shunyamurti (Manifestation of the Void) applied to a Buddha is full of significance.) sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
Ignorant and profane aestheticism, at least in practice, puts the beautiful – or what its sentimental idealism takes to be the beautiful – above the true, and in so doing exposes itself to errors on its own level. But if aestheticism is the unintelligent cult of the beautiful, or more precisely of aesthetic feeling, this in no way implies that a sense of beauty is mere aestheticism. This is not to say that man is limited to a choice between aestheticism and aesthetics, or, in other words, between idolizing of the beautiful and the science of beauty. Love of beauty is a quality which exists apart from its sentimental deviations and its intellectual foundations. Beauty is a REFLECTION of Divine bliss, and since God is Truth, the REFLECTION of His bliss will be that mixture of happiness and truth which is to be found in all beauty. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
There are two aspects to every symbol: the first of these adequately reflects the Divine function and so constitutes the sufficient reason for the symbolism; the other consists simply of the REFLECTION as such and is therefore contingent. The first of these aspects is the content, while the second is the mode of its manifestation. When we say ‘femininity’, we have no need to consider the possible modes of expression of the feminine principle; it is not the species, race or individual that matters, only the feminine quality. It is the same with every symbolism: thus the sun on the one hand presents a content, which is its luminosity, its caloricity, its central position and its immutability in relation to the planets; and on the other hand it presents a mode of manifestation, namely its matter, its density and its spatial limitation. It is clearly the qualities of the sun and not its limitations which manifest something of God. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE
There is not only the beauty of the adult, there is also that of the child as our mention of the Child Jesus suggests. First of all, it must be said that the child, being human, participates in the same symbolism and in the same aesthetic expressivity as do his parents – we are speaking always of man as such and not of particular individuals – and then, that childhood is nevertheless a provisional state and does not in general have the definitive and representative value of maturity. (NA: But it can when the individual value of the child visibly over rides his state of immaturity; notwithstanding the fact that childhood is in itself an incomplete state which points towards its own completion.) In metaphysical symbolism, this provisional character expresses relativity: the child is what “comes after” his parents, he is the REFLECTION of Atmâ in Mâyâ, to some degree and according to the ontological or cosmological level in view; or it is even Mâyâ itself if the adult is Atmâ. (NA: Polarized into “Necessary Being” and “All-Possibility.”) But from an altogether different point of view, and according to inverse analogy, the key to which is given by the seal of Solomon, (NA: When a tree is mirrored in a lake, its top is at the bottom, but the image is always that of a tree; the analogy is inverse in the first relationship and parallel in the second. Analogies between the divine order and the cosmic order always comprise one or the other of these relationships.) the child represents on the contrary what “was before,” namely what is simple, pure, innocent, primordial and close to the Essence, and this is what its beauty expresses; (NA: We do not say that every human individual is beautiful when he is a child, but we start from the idea that man, child or not, is beautiful to the extent that he is physically what he ought to be.) this beauty has all the charm of promise, of hope and of blossoming, at the same time as that of a Paradise not yet lost; it combines the proximity of the Origin with the tension towards the Goal. And it is for that reason that childhood constitutes a necessary aspect of the integral man, therefore in conformity with the divine Intention: the man who is fully mature always keeps, in equilibrium with wisdom, the qualities of simplicity and freshness, of gratitude and trust, that he possessed in the springtime of his life. (NA: “Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 18:3)) Since we have just mentioned the principle of inverse analogy, we may here connect it with its application to femininity: even though a priori femininity is subordinate to virility, it also comprises an aspect which makes it superior to a given aspect of the masculine pole; for the divine Principle has an aspect of unlimitedness, virginal mystery and maternal mercy which takes precedence over a certain more relative aspect of determination, logical precision and implacable justice. (NA: According to Tacitus, the Germans discerned something sacred and visionary in women. The fact that in German the sun (die Sonne) is feminine whereas the moon (der Mond) is masculine, bears witness to the same perspective.) Seen thus, feminine beauty appears as an initiatic wine in the face of the rationality represented in certain respects by the masculine body. (NA: Mahâyanic art represents Prajnâpâramitâ, the “Perfection of Gnosis,” in feminine form; likewise, Prajnâ, liberating Knowledge, appears as a woman in the face of Upâya, the doctrinal system or the art of convincing, which is represented as masculine. The Buddhists readily point out that the Bodhisattvas, in themselves asexual, have the power to take a feminine form as they do any other form; now one would like to know for what reason they do so, for if the feminine form can produce such a great good, it is because it is intrinsically good; otherwise there would be no reason for a Bodhisattva to assume it.) sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body
Let us return now to the question of traditional misogynist viewpoints: Buddhism, as we have noted, is es sentially a masculine, abstract, negative, ascetic and heroic spirituality, at least a priori and in its broad outlines; the feminine body must appear to it as the very embodiment of seduction and thereby of samsâra, of the round of births and deaths. But here we are in the presence of that inverse analogy to which we referred above: what pulls downward is in this case what, in reality, lies above; and femininity, inasmuch as it seduces and binds, has this aspect precisely because it offers, in itself and in the intention of the Creator, an image of liberating Bliss; now a REFLECTION is always “something” of what it reflects, which amounts to saying that it “is” this reality in an indirect mode and on the plane of contingency. This is what the Buddhists grasped in the framework of Mahayanic esoterism – the Tibetans and the Mongols above all – and it is this which permitted them to introduce into their sanctuaries nude Târâs and Dakinis in gilded bronze; the corporeal theophany of feminine type being intended to actualize in the faithful the remembrance of the merciful and beatific dimension of Bodhi and of Nirvana. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body
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
In a quite general way, that which calls for suspicion and for implacable vigilance is the reducing of the spiritual to the psychic, a practice which by now has become a commonplace to the point of characterizing Western interpretations of the traditional doctrines. This so-called ‘psychology of spirituality’ or this ‘psychoanalysis of the sacred’ is the breach through which the mortal poison of modern relativism infiltrates into the still living Oriental traditions. According to Jung the figurative emergence of certain contents of the ‘collective unconscious’ is accompanied empirically, as its psychic complement, by a noumenal sensation of eternity and infinitude. This is the way to ruin insidiously all transcendence and all intellection, for, according to this theory, it is the collective unconscious, or subconscious, which is at the origin of ‘individuated’ consciousness, human intelligence having two components, namely the REFLECTION of the subconscious on the one hand and the experience of the external world on the other ; but since experience is not in itself intelligence, on this showing intelligence will have the subconscious for its substance, so that one has to try and define the subconscious on the basis of its own ramification. This is the classical contradiction of all subjectivist and relativist philosophy. (The Essentials Writings of Frithjof Schuon, p. 219) sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism