What we blame in those who are contemptuous of "metaphysical ratiocination" and the "subject-object opposition" is not so much a given perspective as the exaggeration resulting from it or nourished by it. Excess is in the nature of man; pious exaggeration is inevitable on the whole, as is the sectarian mentality. We do not remember who said "all that is excessive is insignificant"; this is quite true, but let us not lose sight of the fact that on the religious plane, hyperbole veils an intention that in the end is merciful; it is then a question of upâya, of a "saving stratagem". Doubtless, the voices of wisdom that esoterically either condemn or justify "holy absurdities" may appear "heretical" from the standpoint of a given literalistic orthodoxy, but "God knoweth His own"; the Divine Intellect is not limited by a given theology or a given morality. According to the norm, that which is true saves; according to Grace, that which saves is true. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy  

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

Even within the order of physical causes, one has to take into account the simultaneous presence of the immanent metaphysical Cause: if a seed is the immediate cause of a plant, it is because the divine archetype intervenes in the physical causality. Geometrically speaking, causes can be situated on the "concentric circles" that constitute the Universe, but other causes - and with all the more reason the First Cause - are situated at the Center and act through the radii emanating from it. The divine Intellect contains the archetypes of creation, and it is starting from this Cause - or from this causal system - at a given cyclic "moment" of the cosmogonic process, that the "ideas" are "incarnated" which will be manifested in the form of contingent creatures. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

In the opinion of all profane thinkers, philosophy means to think "freely," as far as possible without presuppositions, which precisely is impossible; on the other hand, gnosis, or philosophy in the proper and primitive sense of the word, is to think in accordance with the immanent Intellect and not by means of reason alone. sophiaperennis: What is a philosopher?

In short: we reject rationalism not because of its possibly plausible criticisms of humanized religion, but because of its negation of the divine kernel of the phenomenon of religion; a negation that essentially implies the negation of intellectual intuition, thus of that immanent Divine Presence which is the Intellect. The basic error of systematized rationality - by the way, it is wrong to attribute this ideology to the great Greeks - is to put fallible reasoning in place of infallible intellection; as if the rational faculty were the whole of Intelligence and even the only Intelligence. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism

If Plato maintains that the philosophos should think independently of common opinions, he refers to intellection and not to logic alone; whereas a Descartes  , who did everything to restrict and compromise the notion of philosophy, means it while starting from systematic doubt, so much so that for him philosophy is synonymous not only with rationalism, but also with skepticism. This is a first suicide of the intelligence, inaugurated moreover by Pyrrho and others, by way of a reaction against what was believed to be metaphysical "dogmatism." The "Greek miracle" is in fact the substitution of the reason for the Intellect, of the fact for the Principle, of the phenomenon for the Idea, of the accident for the Substance, of the form for the Essence, of man for God; and this applies to art as well as to thought. The true Greek miracle, if miracle there be - and in this case it would be related to the "Hindu miracle" - is doctrinal metaphysics and methodic logic, providentially utilized by the monotheistic Semites. sophiaperennis: Difference between Philosophy, theology and gnosis

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?

In the example just given error corresponds to an inadequate view of the object whereas a dogmatic conception is comparable to the exclusive view of one aspect of the object, a view which supposes the immobility of the seeing subject. As for a speculative and therefore intellectually unlimited conception, this may be compared to the sum of all possible views of the object in question, views which presuppose in the subject a power of displacement or an ability to alter his viewpoint, hence a certain mode of identity with the dimensions of space, which themselves effectually reveal the integral nature of the object, at least with respect to its form which is all that is in question in the example given. Movement in space is in fact an active participation in the possibilities of space, whereas static extension in space, the form of our bodies for example, is a passive participation in these same possibilities. This may be transposed without difficulty to a higher plane and one may then speak of an ’intellectual space, namely the cognitive all-possibility which is fundamentally the same as the divine Omniscience, and consequently of ’intellectual dimensions’ which are the ’internal’ modalities of this Omniscience; Knowledge through the Intellect is none other than the perfect participation of the subject in these modalities, and in the physical world this participation is effectively represented by movement. sophiaperennis: What is dogmatism?

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

In order to define clearly the difference between the two modes in question, it may be said that philosophy proceeds from reason (which is a purely individual faculty), whereas metaphysic proceeds exclusively from the Intellect. sophiaperennis: Difference between Metaphysics and Philosophy

The latter faculty has been defined by Meister Eckhardt   - who fully understood the import of his words - as follows: ’There is something in the soul which is uncreated and uncreatable; if the whole soul were this it would be uncreated and uncreatable; and this is the Intellect.’ sophiaperennis: Difference between Metaphysics and Philosophy

An analogous definition, which is still more concise and even richer   in symbolic value, is to be found in Moslem esotericism: ’The Sufi (that is to say man identified with the Intellect) is uncreated.’ Since purely intellectual knowledge is by definition beyond the reach of the individual, being in its essence supra-individual, universal or divine, and since it proceeds from pure Intelligence, which is direct and not discursive, it follows that this knowledge not only goes infinitely farther than reasoning, but even goes farther than faith in the ordinary sense of this term. sophiaperennis: Difference between Metaphysics and Philosophy

Thus metaphysical certitude is absolute because of the identity between the knower and the known in the Intellect. If an example may be drawn from the sensory sphere to illustrate the difference between metaphysical and religious knowledge, it may be said that the former, which can be called ’esoteric’ when it is manifested through a religious symbolism, is conscious of the colourless essence of light and of its character of pure luminosity; a given religious belief, on the other hand, will assert that light is red and not green, whereas another belief will assert the opposite; both will be right in so far as they distinguish light from darkness but not in so far as they identify it with a particular colour. sophiaperennis: Difference between Metaphysics and Philosophy

That is why each of the great and intrinsically orthodox religions can, through its dogmas, rites and other symbols, serve as a means of expressing all the truths known directly by the eye of the Intellect, the spiritual organ which is called in Moslem esotericism the ’eye of the heart’. We have just stated that religion translates metaphysical or universal truths into dogmatic language. sophiaperennis: Difference between Metaphysics and Philosophy

Now, though dogma is not accessible to all men in its intrinsic truth, which can only be directly attained by the Intellect, it is none the less accessible through faith, which is, for most people, the only possible mode of participation in the divine truths. As for intellectual knowledge, which, as we have seen, proceeds neither from belief nor from a process of reasoning, it goes beyond dogma in the sense that, without ever contradicting the latter, it penetrates its ’internal dimension’, that is, the infinite Truth which dominates all forms. sophiaperennis: Difference between Metaphysics and Philosophy

The solution to the problem of knowledge - if there is a problem - could not possibly be this intellectual suicide that is the promotion of doubt; on the contrary, it lies in having recourse to a source of certitude that transcends the mental mechanism, and this source - the only one there is - is the pure Intellect, or Intelligence as such. The so-called century of "enlightenment" did not suspect its existence; for the Encyclopedists, all that the Intellect had offered - from Pythagoras   to the Scholastics - was merely naive dogmatism, even "obscurantism." Quite paradoxically, the cult of reason ended in the sub-rationalism - or "esoterism of stupidity" - that is existentialism in all its forms; it is to illusorily replace intelligence with "existence." sophiaperennis: Original meaning of the word Philosophy

But it is also, more especially and according to the best of the Greeks, to express by means of the reason certainties "seen" or "lived" by the immanent Intellect, as we have remarked above; now the explanation necessarily takes on the character imposed on it by the laws of thought and language. sophiaperennis: What is thought?

In the opinion of all profane thinkers, philosophy means to think "freely," as far as possible without presuppositions, which precisely is impossible; on the other hand, gnosis, or philosophy in the proper and primitive sense of the word, is to think in accordance with the immanent Intellect and not by means of reason alone. What favors confusion is the fact that in both cases the intelligence operates independently of outward prescriptions, although for diametrically opposed reasons: that the rationalist if need be draws his inspiration from a pre-existing system does not prevent him from thinking in a way that he deems to be "free"- falsely, since true freedom coincides with truth - likewise, mutatis mutandis: that the gnostic - in the orthodox sense of the term - bases himself extrinsically on a given sacred Scripture or on some other gnostic cannot prevent him from thinking in an intrinsically free manner by virtue of the freedom proper to the immanent Truth, or proper to the Essence which by delinition escapes formal constraints. Or again: whether the gnostic "thinks" what he has "seen" with the "eye of the heart," or whether on the contrary he obtains his "vision" thanks to the intervention - preliminary and provisional and in no wise efficient - of a thought which then takes on the role of occasional cause , is a matter of indifference with regard to the truth, or with regard to its almost supernatural springing forth in the spirit. sophiaperennis: Profane "thinkers"

Profane philosophy is ignorant not only of the value of truth and universality in Revelation, but also of the transcendence of the pure Intellect; [NA: For example, the Cartesian Cogito is neither conformable to Revelation, nor the consequence of a direct intellection: it has no scriptural basis, since according to Scripture the foundation of existence is Being and not some experience or other; and it lacks inspiration, since direct intellective perception excludes a purely empirical process of reasoning. When Locke   says Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu, the statement is false in the same two respects; firstly, Scripture affirms that the intellect derives from God and not from the body - for man, "made in the image of God," is distinguished from animals by the intelligence not by the senses - and secondly, the intellect conceives of realities which it does not discern a priori in the world, though it may seek their traces a posteriori in sensory perceptions.] it entails therefore no guarantee of truth on any level, for the quite human faculty which reason is, insofar as it is cut off from the Absolute, is readily mistaken even on the level of the relative. The efficacy of reasoning is essentially conditional. sophiaperennis: Profane "thinkers"

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

This may be transposed without difficulty to a higher plane and one may then speak of an ’intellectual space’, namely the cognitive all - possibility which is fundamentally the same as the divine Omniscience, and consequently of ’intellectual dimensions’ which are the ’internal’ modalities of this Omniscience; Knowledge through the Intellect is none other than the perfect participation of the subject in these modalities, and in the physical world this participation is effectively represented by movement. sophiaperennis: What is the understanding of an idea?

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?

Platonic recollection is none other than the participation of the human Intellect in the ontological insights of the Divine Intellect; this is why the Sufi is said to be ’arif bi-’Llah, "knower by Allah", in keeping with the teaching of a famous hadith according to which God is the "Eye wherewith he (the Sufi) seeth"; and this explains the nature of the "Eye of Knowledge", or of the "Eye of the Heart". sophiaperennis: Plato

If Plato maintains that the philosophos should think independently of common opinions, he refers to intellection and not to logic alone; whereas a Descartes, who did everything to restrict and compromise the notion of philosophy, means it while starting from systematic doubt, so much so that for him philosophy is synonymous not only with rationalism, but also with skepticism. This is a first suicide of the intelligence, inaugurated moreover by Pyrrho and others, by way of a reaction against what was believed to be metaphysical "dogmatism." The "Greek miracle" is in fact the substitution of the reason for the Intellect, of the fact for the Principle, of the phenomenon for the Idea, of the accident for the Substance, of the form for the Essence, of man for God; and this applies to art as well as to thought. The true Greek miracle, if miracle there be - and in this case it would be related to the "Hindu miracle" - is doctrinal metaphysics and methodic logic, providentially utilized by the monotheistic Semites. sophiaperennis: Plato

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

It is indispensable to know at the outset that there are truths inherent in the human spirit that are as if buried in the "depths of the heart," which means that they are contained as potentialities or virtualities in the pure Intellect: these are the principial and archetypal truths, those which prefigure and determine all others. They are accessible, intuitively and infallibly, to the "gnostic," the "pneumatic," the "theosopher" - in the proper and original meaning of these terms - and they are accessible consequently to the "philosopher" according to the still literal and innocent meaning of the word: to a Pythagoras or a Plato, and to a certain extent even to an Aristotle  , in spite of his exteriorizing and virtually scientistic perspective. sophiaperennis: Platonism and Christianity

It has been said and said again that the Hellenists and the Orientals - the "Platonic" spirits in the widest sense - have become blameworthy in "arrogantly" rejecting Christ, or that they are trying to escape from their "responsibilities"- once again and always ! - as creatures towards the Creator in withdrawing into their own centre where they claim to find, in their pure being, the essence of things and the Divine Reality; they thus dilute, it seems, the quality of creature and at the same time t hat of Creator with a sort of pantheistic impersonalism, which amounts to saying that they destroy the relationship of "obligation" between the Creator and the creature. In reality "responsibilities" are relative as we ourselves are relative in our existential specification; they cannot be less relative - or "more absolute"- than the subject to which they are related. One who, by the grace of Heaven, succeeds in escaping from the tyranny of the ego is by that very circumstance discharged from the responsibilities which the ego implies. God shows himself as creative Person in so far as - or in relation to the fact that - we are "creature" and individual, but that particular reciprocal relationship is far from exhausting all our ontological and intellectual nature; that is to say, our nature cannot be exhaustively defined by notions of "duty", of "rights", nor by other fixations of the kind. It has been said that the "rejection" of the Christie gift on the part of the "Platonic" spirit constitutes the subtlest and most Luciferan perversity of the intelligence; this argument, born of an instinct of selfpreservation, wrong in its inspiration but comprehensible on its own plane, can easily and far more pertinently be turned against those who make use of it: for, if we are to be obliged at all costs to find some mental perversion somewhere, we shall find it with those who want to substitute for the Absolute a personal and therefore relative God, and temporal phenomena for metaphysical principles, and that not in connection with a childlike faith that asks nothing of anybody, but within the framework of the most exacting erudition and the most totalitarian intellectual pretension. If there is such a thing as abuse of the intelligence, it is to be found in the substitution of the relative for the Absolute, or the accident from the Substance, on the pretext of putting the "concrete" above the "abstract"; it is not to be found in the rejection - in the name of transcendent and immutable principles - of a relativity presented as absoluteness. The misunderstanding between Christians and Hellenists can for the greater part be condensed to a false alternative: in effect, the fact that God resides in our deepest "being"- or at the extreme transpersonal depth of our consciousness - and that we can in principle realize him with the help of the pure and theomorphic intellect, in no way excludes the equal and simultaneous affirmation of this immanent and impersonal Divinity as objective and personal, nor the fact that we can do nothing without his grace, despite the essentially "divine" character of the Intellect in which we participate naturally and supernaturally. sophiaperennis: Platonism and Christianity

Reason, then, to the extent that it is artificially divorced from the Intellect, engenders individualism and arbitrariness. This is exactly what happens in the case of someone like Kant  , who is a rationalist even while rejecting "dogmatic rationalism"; while the latter is doubtless rationalism, the Kantian critical philosophy is even more deserving of the name, indeed it is the very acme of rationalism. sophiaperennis: Kantianism

If Plato maintains that the philosophos should think independently of common opinions, he refers to intellection and not to logic alone; whereas a Descartes, who did everything to restrict and compromise the notion of philosophy, means it while starting from systematic doubt, so much so that for him philosophy is synonymous not only with rationalism, but also with skepticism. This is a first suicide of the intelligence, inaugurated moreover by Pyrrho and others, by way of a reaction against what was believed to be metaphysical "dogmatism." The "Greek miracle" is in fact the substitution of the reason for the Intellect, of the fact for the Principle, of the phenomenon for the Idea, of the accident for the Substance, of the form for the Essence, of man for God; and this applies to art as well as to thought. The true Greek miracle, if miracle there be - and in this case it would be related to the "Hindu miracle" - is doctrinal metaphysics and methodic logic, providentially utilized by the monotheistic Semites. sophiaperennis: Descartes and the Cogito

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

The "Great Vehicle" possesses a mysterious dimension known as the "Adamantine Vehicle" (Vajrayana); in order to grasp its meaning, one has to first understand what we repeatedly have termed the "metaphysical transparency of the world," that is to say one has to base oneself on a perspective according to which - to quote an expression of Pascal  ’s we favor - Reality is "an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere": it is this circumference and this center which are represented, in the adamantine doctrine, by the Buddha Mahavairochana (in Japanese Dainichi Nyorai) who is at one and the same time - in Vedantic terms - Atma, Ishvara and Buddhi; that is to say Supra-ontological Essence, Ontological Essence and Universal Intellect. This metaphysical transparency everywhere refers the effect back to the Cause without, however, doing away with the irreversibility of the causal relationship; the Absolute is nowise causal in itself, since in reality nothing can be outside It, but it is causal from the point of view of the cosmos which is real only as effect and in virtue of the metaphysical reduction of the effect to the Cause. Thus "all is Atma," or all is Shunya ("Void") or Vairochana - or "solarity" if we bear in mind the etymology as well as the symbolism of this Sanskrit name - but no thing is in itself, in its accidentality the "Self" or the "Void" or the "solar Buddha." sophiaperennis: Pascal

It is clearly the deiformity of the human body that has inspired sacred nudity; discredited in the Semitic religions for reasons of spiritual perspective and social opportuneness - although it has been manifested sporadically among contemplatives disposed to primordiality - it is still the order of the day in India, immemorial homeland of the "gymnosophists." Krishna, in removing all clothing from the adoring gopis, "baptized" them so to speak: he reduced them to the state before the "fall." [NA: In the climate of Semitic monotheism, dress doubtless represents the choice of the "spirit" against the "flesh"; nonetheless the body intrinsically expresses deiformity, hence primordial "divinity" and immanence. In a certain sense, if dress indicates the soul or the function, the body indicates the Intellect.] The path of liberation is to rebecome what one is. sophiaperennis: ART, ITS DUTIES AND ITS RIGHTS

If the importance of forms is to be understood, it is necessary to appreciate the fact that it is the sensible form which, symbolically, corresponds most directly to the Intellect, by reason of the inverse analogy connecting the principial and manifested orders. [NA: ’Art’, said St. Thomas Aquinas  , ’is associated with knowledge.’ As for the metaphysical theory of inverse analogy, we would refer the reader to the doctrinal works of René Guénon, especially to ’L’homme et son devenir selon le Vêdânta’ (Man and his Becoming according to the Vedanta, Luzac, 1946).] In consequence of this analogy the highest realities are most clearly manifested in their remotest reflections, namely, in the sensible or ’material’ order, and herein lies the deepest meaning of the proverb ’extremes meet’; to which one might add that it is for this same reason that Revelation descended not only into the souls of the Prophets, but also into their bodies, which presupposed their physical perfection. [NA: René Guénon (Les deux nuits -The Two Nights, in Etudes Traditionnelles, Paris, Chacornac, April and May, 1939) in speaking of the laylat el-qadr, night of the ’descent’ (tanzil) of the Koran  , points out that ’this night, according to Mohyiddin ibn Arabi  ’s commentary, is identified with the actual body of the Prophet. What is particularly important to note is the fact that the " revelation" is received, not in the mind, but in the body of the being who is commissioned to express the Principle: "And the Word was made flesh" says the Gospel   (" flesh" and not "mind") and this is but another way of expressing, under the form proper to the Christian Tradition, the reality which is represented by the laylat el-qadr in the Islamic Tradition.’ This truth is closely bound up with the relationship mentioned as existing between forms and intellections.] sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

A science, to truly deserve that name, owes us an explanation of a certain order of phenomena; now modern science, which claims to be all-embracing by the very fact that it recognizes nothing outside itself as valid, is unable to explain to us, for instance, what a sacred book is, or a saint or a miracle; it knows nothing of God, of the hereafter or the Intellect and it cannot even tell us anything about phenomena such as premonition or telepathy; it does not know in virtue of what principle or possibility shamanistic procedures may cure illnesses or attract rain. [NA: There is a singular irony in the indignation of those who consider that belief in sorcerers and ghosts is incompatible with the science of the "atomic age", whereas this age is precisely - and utterly — ignorant of what said "beliefs" mean. Only what can be verified "with laboratory clarity" is held to be true, as if it were logical and objective to demand, in the name of truth, conditions which may be contrary to the nature of things, and as if it were a proof of imagination to deny the very possibility of such incompatibilities.] [Treasures of Buddhism, p. 43]. sophiaperennis: Limits of modern science

The man who wishes to know the visible -to know it both in entirety and in depth - is obliged for that very reason to know the Invisible, on pain of absurdity and ineffectualness; to know it according to the principles which the very nature of the Invisible imposes on the human mind; hence to know it by being aware that the solution to the contradictions of the objective world is found only in the transpersonal essence of the subject, namely in the pure Intellect. [From the Divine to the Human, p.143]. sophiaperennis: Limits of modern science

There are truths which intuitive intellection alone allows one to attain, but it is not a fact that such intellection lies within the capacity of every man of ordinarily sound mind. Moreover the Intellect, for its part, requires Revelation, both as its occasional cause and as vehicle of the ’Perennial Philosophy,’ if it is to actualize its own light in more than a fragmentary manner. sophiaperennis: Science and mythologies

A science of the finite has need of a wisdom which goes beyond it and controls it, just as the body needs a soul to animate it, and the reason an intellect to illumine it. The "Greek miracle" with its so-called "liberation of the human spirit" is in reality nothing but the beginning of a purely external knowledge, cut off from genuine Sophia. [NA: It is said that Einstein, for example, revolutionized the vision of the world as Galileo or Newton had done before him, and that the usual conceptions which he overturned - those of space, time, light and matter - are "as naive as those of the Middle Ages"; but then there is nothing to guarantee that his theory of relativity will not bejudged naive in its turn, so that, in profane science, it is never possible to escape the vicious circle of "naivety." — Moreover, what could be more naive than to seek to enclose the Universe in a few mathematical formulae, and then to be surprised to find that there always remains an elusive and apparently "irrational" element which evades all attempts to "bring it to heel"? — We shall no doubt be told that not all scientists are atheists, but this is not the question, since atheism is inherent in science itself, in its postulates and its methods. The Einsteinian theories on mass, space and time are of a nature to demonstrate the fissures in the physical universe, but only a metaphysician can profit from them; science unconsciously provides keys, but is incapable of making use of them, because intellectuality cannot be replaced by something outside itself. The theory of relativity illustrates of necessity certain aspects of metaphysics, but does not of itself open up any higher perspective; the way in which Euclidean geometry is improperly relativized goes to prove this. On the one hand the philosophical point of view trespasses on science, and on the other the scientific point of view trespasses on metaphysics. — As for the Einsteinian postulate of a transmathematical absolute, this absolute is not supra-conscious: it is not therefore more than ourselves and could not be the Cause of our intelligence; Einstein’s "God" remains blind just as his relativized universe remains physical: one might as well say that it is nothing. Modern science has nothing it can tell us - and this not by accident but by principle - about the miracle of consciousness and all that is connected with it, from the most minute particles of consciousness to be found in creation up to the pure and trans-personal Intellect.] [Stations of Wisdom, p. 26-27]. sophiaperennis: Science and rationalism

In other words, the foundations of modem science are false because, from the "subject" point of view, it replaces Intellect and Revelation by reason and experiment, as if it were not contradictory to lay claim to totality on an empirical basis; and its foundations are false too because, from the "object" point of view, it replaces the universal Substance by matter alone, either denying the universal Principle or reducing it to matter or to some kind of pseudo-absolute from which all transcendence has been eliminated. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

In all epochs and in all countries there have been revelations, religions, wisdoms; tradition is a part of mankind, just as man is a part of tradition. Revelation is in one sense the infallible intellection of the total collectivity, in so far as this collectivity has providentially become the receptacle of a manifestation of the universal Intellect. The source of this intellection is not of course the collectivity as such, but the universal or divine Intellect in so far as it adapts itself to the conditions prevailing in a particular intellectual or moral collectivity, whether it be a case of an ethnic group or of one determined by more or less distinctive mental conditions. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

It is not surprising that a science arising out of the fall — or one of the falls— and out of an illusory rediscovery of the sensory world should also be a science of nothing but the sensory [NA: This distinction is necessary to meet the objection that science operates with elements inaccessible to our senses.], or what is virtually sensory, and that it should deny everything which surpasses that domain, thereby denying God, the next world and the soul [NA: Not all scientists deny these realities, but science denies them, and that is quite a different thing.], and this presupposes a denial of the pure Intellect, which alone is capable of knowing everything that modern science rejects. For the same reasons it also denies Revelation, which alone rebuilds the bridge broken by the fall. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

In other words, the foundations of modem science are false because, from the "subject" point of view, it replaces Intellect and Revelation by reason and experiment, as if it were not contradictory to lay claim to totality on an empirical basis; and its foundations are false too because, from the "object" point of view, it replaces the universal Substance by matter alone, either denying the universal Principle or reducing it to matter or to some kind of pseudo-absolute from which all transcendence has been eliminated. sophiaperennis: Science and Tradition

In all epochs and in all countries there have been revelations, religions, wisdoms; tradition is a part of mankind, just as man is a part of tradition. Revelation is in one sense the infallible intellection of the total collectivity, in so far as this collectivity has providentially become the receptacle of a manifestation of the universal Intellect. The source of this intellection is not of course the collectivity as such, but the universal or divine Intellect in so far as it adapts itself to the conditions prevailing in a particular intellectual or moral collectivity, whether it be a case of an ethnic group or of one determined by more or less distinctive mental conditions. sophiaperennis: Science and Tradition

It is not surprising that a science arising out of the fall - or one of the falls - and out of an illusory rediscovery of the sensory world should also be a science of nothing but the sensory, or what is virtually sensory, [NA: This distinction is necessary to meet the objection that science operates with elements inaccessible to our senses] and that it should deny everything which surpasses that domain, thereby denying God, the next world and the soul, [NA: Not all scientists deny these realities, but science denies them, and that is quite a different thing.] and this presupposes a denial of the pure Intellect, which alone is capable of knowing everything that modern science rejects. sophiaperennis: Science and negation of Transcendence

Modern science has nothing it can tell us — and this is not by accident but by principle — about the miracle of consciousness and all that is connected with it, from the most minute particles of consciousness to be found in creation up to the pure and trans-personal Intellect. sophiaperennis: Einstein