According to Pythagoras  , wisdom is a priori the knowledge of the stellar world and of all that is situated above us; sophia being the wisdom of the gods, and philosophia that of men. For Heraclitus  , the philosopher is one who applies himself to the knowledge of the profound nature of things; whereas for Plato, philosophy is the knowledge of the Immutable and of the Ideas; and for Aristotle  , it is the knowledge of first causes and principles, together with the sciences that are derived from them. sophiaperennis: What is a philosopher?

All this shows that, to say the least, the word "philosopher" in itself has nothing restrictive about it, and that one cannot legitimately impute to this word any of the vexing associations of ideas that it may elicit; usage applies this word to all thinkers, including eminent metaphysicians - some Sufis consider Plato and other Greeks to be prophets - so that one would like to reserve it for sages and simply use the term "rationalists" for profane thinkers. It is nevertheless legitimate to take account of a misuse of language that has become conventional, for unquestionably the terms "philosophy" and "philosopher" have been seriously compromised by ancient and modern reasoners; in fact, the serious inconvenience of these terms is that they conventionally imply that the norm for the mind is reasoning pure and simple, [NA: Naturally the most " advanced" of the modernists seek to demolish the very principles of reasoning, but this is simply fantasy pro domo, for man is condemned to reason as soon as he uses language, unless he wishes to demonstrate nothing at all. In any case, one cannot demonstrate the impossibility of demonstrating anything, if words are still to have any meaning.] in the absence not only of intellection, but also of indispensable objective data. Admittedly one is neither ignorant nor rationalistic just because one is a logician, but one is both if one is a logician and nothing more. [NA: A German author (H. Turck) has proposed the term "misosopher" -" enemy of wisdom"- for those thinkers who undermine the very foundations of truth and intelligence. We will add that misosophy - without mentioning some ancient precedents - begins grosso modo with " criticism" and ends with subjectivisms, relativisms, existentialisms, dynamisms, psychologisms and biologisms of every kind. As for the ancient expression "misology," it designates above all the hatred of the fideist for the use of reason.] sophiaperennis: What is a philosopher?

If the Westerner - "free thinker" or not - has a tendency to "think for himself," wrongly or rightly according to the case, this is due to distant causes; the Western mind expressed itself through Plato and Aristotle before having undergone the influence of Christian fideism, and even then, and from the very outset, it could not help having recourse to the Greek philosophers. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism

"This is only philosophy": we readily accept the use of this turn of phrase, but only on condition that one does not say that "Plato is only a philosopher," Plato who said that "beauty is the splendor of the true"; beauty that includes or demands all that we are or can be. sophiaperennis: Difference between Philosophy, theology and gnosis

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

Wearied by the artifices and the lack of imagination of academic rationalism, many of our contemporaries in rejecting it reject true metaphysics as well, because they think it "abstract" - which in their minds is synonymous with "artificial" - and seek the "concrete," not beyond the rational and in the order of ontological prototypes, but in crude fact, in the sensory, the "actual"; man becomes the arbitrary measure of everything, and thereby abdicates his dignity as man, namely his possibility of objective and universal knowledge. He is then the measure of things not in a truly human but in an animal way; his dull empiricism is that of an animal which registers facts and notices a pasture or a path; but since he is despite all a "human animal," he disguises his dullness in mental arabesques. The existentialists are human as it were by chance; what distinguishes them from animals is not human intelligence but the human style of an infra-human intelligence. The protagonists of "concrete" thought, of whatever shade, readily label as "speculations in the abstract" whatever goes beyond their understanding, but they forget to tell us why these speculations are possible, that is to say what confers this strange possibility on human intelligence. Thus what does it mean that for thousands of years men deemed to be wise have practiced such speculations, and by what right does one call "intellectual progress" the replacement of these speculations by a crude empiricism which excludes on principle any operation characteristic of intelligence? If these "positivists" are right, none but they are intelligent; all the founders of religions, all the saints, all the sages have been wrong on essentials whereas Mr. So-and-So at long last sees things clearly; one might just as well say that human intelligence does not exist. There are those who claim that the idea of God is to be explained only by social opportunism, without taking account of the infinite disproportion and the contradiction involved in such a hypothesis; if such men as Plato, Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas   - not to mention the Prophets, or Christ or the sages of Asia - were not capable of noticing that God is merely a social prejudice or some other dupery of the kind, and if hundreds and thousands of years have been based intellectually on their incapacity, then there is no human intelligence, and still less any possibility of progress, for a being absurd by nature does not contain the possibility of ceasing to be absurd. sophiaperennis: Existentialism

It is the sophists, with Protagoras at their head, who are the true precursors of modern thought; they are the "thinkers" properly so called, in the sense that they limited themselves to reasoning and were hardly concerned with "perceiving" and taking into account that which "is." And it is a mistake to see in Socrates  , Plato and Aristotle the fathers of rationalism, or even of modern thought generally; no doubt they reasoned - Shankara   and Ramanuja   did so as well - but they never said that reasoning is the alpha and omega of intelligence and of truth, nor a fortiori that our experiences or our tastes determine thought and have priority over intellectual intuition and logic, quod absit. sophiaperennis: Protagoras

Plato represents the inward dimension, subjective extension, synthesis and reintegration, whereas Aristotle represents the outward dimension, objective extension, analysis and projection; but this does not mean that Aristotle was a rationalist in the modern sense of the word. For the ancients, in fact, "reason" is synonymous with "intellect": reasoning prolongs intellection more or less, depending upon the level of the subject matter under consideration. sophiaperennis: Plato

The Augustinian idea that the good tends by its very nature to communicate itself, is at bottom Platonic: this idea is self-evident since, according to Plato, the Absolute is by definition the "Sovereign Good," the Agathòn; and to say "Good," is to say Radiation or Manifestation. sophiaperennis: Plato

It would be futile to believe that Plato drew everything from himself, or that a Shankara had no need of the Upanishads  , although in principle such a thing is not inconceivable. sophiaperennis: Plato

It should be noted that Meister Eckhart   called Plato " the great priest", and that Jili   had a vision of him "filling the whole of space with light"; also, that the disciples of Rumi   see in Plato (Sayyid-na Aflatun) a kind of prophet. Moslem authors in general see in him an eminent master of music, like Orpheus charming wild beasts with his lute in virgin nature whither he had withdrawn after a disagreement with Aristotle, which is full of meaning. It may be added that Plato, like Socrates and Pythagoras, was the providential spokesman of Orphism. sophiaperennis: Plato

Some Sufis consider Plato and other Greeks to be prophets. sophiaperennis: Plato

Since Plato, Virgil and St. Augustine   have existed, it can no longer be said of man that he is a goat or an ant. sophiaperennis: Plato

Plato is sometimes included under the heading of rationalism, which is unjust despite the rationalistic style of his dialectic and a manner of thinking that is too geometrical; but what puts Plato in the clearest possible opposition to rationalism properly so-called is his doctrine of the eve of the soul. [NA: The opinion linking Plato not only with Pythagoreanism but also with the Egyptian tradition is perhaps not to be disregarded; in that case, the wisdom of Thoth will have survived in alchemy   and partially or indirectly in Neo- Platonism   as well, within Islam no less than in Christianity and Judaism.] This eye, so he teaches, lies buried in a slough from which it must extricate itself in order to mount to the vision of real things, namely the archetypes. Plato doubtless here has in mind an initiatic regeneration, for he says that the eyes of the soul in the case of the ordinary man are not strong enough to bear the vision of the Divine; moreover, this mysterial background helps to explain the somewhat playful character of the Platonic dialogues, since we are most probably dealing here with an intentional dialectical exoterism destined to adapt sacred teachings for a promulgation which had become desirable at that time. sophiaperennis: Plato

However that may be, all the speculations of Plato or Socrates converge upon a vision which transcends the perception of appearances and which opens on to the Essence of things. This Essence is the "Idea" and it confers on things all their perfection, which coincides with beauty. sophiaperennis: Plato

For Plato, the terminal point of the cosmogonic projection is matter, whose role is to make concrete the principle of centrifugal coagulation; for Christians, this "matter" becomes "flesh" and, with it, pleasure, whereas for Islam, as for Judaism, evil is polytheism, idolatry, and disobedience, and thus, finally, duality which, at its ontological root, has no connection - to say the least - with what we call sin. The same is true of Plato’s "matter" and the "flesh" of the Christians when we trace them back to their respective roots, which are Substance and Beatitude. sophiaperennis: Plato

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 cosmic, or more particularly the earthly function of beauty is to actualize in the intelligent creature the Platonic recollection of the archetypes, right up to the luminous Night of the Infinite. [NA: According to Pythagoras and Plato, the soul has heard the heavenly harmonies before being exiled on earth, and music awakens in the soul the remembrance of these melodies.] This leads us to the conclusion that the full understanding of beauty demands virtue and is identifiable with it: that is to say, just as it is necessary to distinguish, in objective beauty, between the outward structure and the message in depth, so there is a distinguo to make, in the sensing of the beautiful, between the aesthetic sensation and the corresponding beauty of soul, namely such and such a virtue. Beyond every question of "sensible consolation" the message of beauty is both intellectual and moral: intellectual because it communicates to us, in the world of accidentality, aspects of Substance, without for all that having to address itself to abstract thought; and moral, because it reminds us of what we must love, and consequently be. In conformity with the Platonic principle that like attracts like, Plotinus   states that "it is always easy to attract the Universal Soul . . . by constructing an object capable of undergoing its influence and receiving its participation. The faithful representation of a thing is always capable of undergoing the influence of its model; it is like a mirror which is capable of grasping the thing’s appearance." [NA: This principle does not prevent a heavenly influence mani festing itself incident ally or accidentally even in an image which is extremely imperfect - works of perversion and subversion being excluded - through pure mercy and by virtue of the ’exception that proves the rule".] This passage states the crucial principle of the almost magical relationship between the conforming recipient and the predestined content or between the adequate symbol and the sacramental presence of the prototype. The ideas of Plotinus must be understood in the light of those of the "divine Plato": the latter approved the fixed types of the sacred sculptures of Egypt, but he rejected the works of the Greek artists who imitated nature in its outward and insignificant accidentality, while following their individual imagination. This verdict immediately excludes from sacred art the productions of an exteriorizing, accidentalizing, sentimentalist and virtuoso naturalism, which sins through abuse of intelligence as much as by neglect of the inward and the essential. sophiaperennis: Plato

Likewise, and for even stronger reasons: the inadequate soul, that is to say, the soul not in conformity with its primordial dignity as "image of God", cannot attract the graces which favour or even constitute sanctity. According to Plato, the eye is "the most solar of instruments-’, which Plotinus comments on as follows: ’’The eye would never have been able to see the sun if it were not itself of solar nature, any more than the soul could see the beautiful if it were not itself beautiful." Platonic Beauty is an aspect of Divinity, and this is why it is the "splendour of the True": this amounts to saying that Infinity is in some fashion the aura of the Absolute, or that Maya is the shakti of Atma, and that consequently every hypostasis of the absolute Real - whatever be its degree - is accompanied by a radiance which we might seek to define with the help of such notions as "harmony", "beauty", "goodness", "mercy" and "beatitude". "God is beautiful and He loves beauty", says a hadith which we have quoted more than once: Atma is not only Sat and Chit, "Being" and ’’Consciousness" - or more relatively: "Power" and "Omniscience" - but also Ananda, "Beatitude", and thus Beauty and Goodness; and what we want to know and realize, we must a priori mirror in our own being, because in the domain of positive realities we can only know perfectly what we are. sophiaperennis: Plato

Plato in his Symposium   recalls the tradition that the human body, or even simply any living body, is like half a sphere; all our faculties and movements look and tend towards a lost centre - which we feel as if "in front" of us - lost, but found again symbolically and indirectly, in sexual union. But the outcome is only a grievous renewal of the drama: a fresh entry of the spirit into matter. The opposite sex is only a symbol: the true centre is hidden in ourselves, in the heart-intellect. The creature recognizes something of the lost centre in his partner; the love which results from it is like a remote shadow of the love of God, and of the intrinsic beatitude of God; it is also a shadow of the knowledge which consumes forms as by fire and which unites and delivers. 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

From the standpoint of integral rationalism, Aristotle has been reproached with stopping halfway and thus being in contradiction with his own principle of knowledge; but this accusation stems entirely from an abusive exploitation of Aristotelian logic, and is the product of a thinking that is artificial to the point of perversion. To Aristotle’s implicit axioms, which his detractors are incapable of perceiving, they oppose a logical automatism which the Stagirite would have been the first to repudiate. If Aristotle is to be blamed it is for the quite contrary reason that his formulation of metaphysics is governed by a tendency toward exteriorization, a tendency which is contrary to the very essence of all metaphysics. Aristotelianism is a science of the Inward expanding toward the outward and thereby tends to favor exteriorization, whereas traditional metaphysics is invariably formulated in view of an interiorization, and for this reason does not encourage the expansion of the natural sciences, or not to an excessive extent. It is this flaw in Aristotelianism that explains the superficiality of its method of knowledge, which was inherited by Thomism and exploited by it as a religious pretext to limit the intellective faculty, despite the latter being capable in principle both of absoluteness and hence also of reaching out to the supernatural; the same defect also explains the corresponding mediocrity of Aristotelian ethics, not to mention the scientism which proves Aristotle’s deviation from the epistemological principle. The important point to retain here is that the Monotheists, whether Semite or Semitized, could not have incorporated Aristotle in their teachings if he had been exclusively a rationalist; but in incorporating him they nonetheless became poisoned, and the partial or virtual rationalism - or rationalism in principle - which resulted has finally given rise to totalitarian rationalism, systematic and self-satisfied, and consequently shut off from every element that is subjectively or objectively suprarational. [NA: It might seem surprising that Scholasticism chose Aristotle and not Plato or Plotinus, hut the reason for this is plain, since from the viewpoint of objective faith there is everything to be gained by promoting a wisdom that offers no competition, and which makes it possible, on the one hand, to neutralize that interloper Intellection, and, on the other, to give carte blanche to any theological contradictions that may occur by describing them as "mysteries."] The Aristotelian Pandora’s box is scientism coupled with sensationalism; it is through these concepts that Aristotle deviates from Plato by replacing the interiorizing tendency with its inverse. People say that the Church has kept science in chains; what is certain is that the modern world has unchained it with the result that it has escaped from all control, and, in the process of destroying nature, is headed toward the destruction of mankind. For genuine Christianity, as for every other traditional perspective, the world is what it appears to be to our empirical vision and there is no good reason for it to be anything else; herein lies the real significance, on the one hand, of the naïveté of the Scriptures, and, on the other, of the trial of Galileo. To try and pierce the wall of collective, normal, millenary experience is to eat of the forbidden fruit, leading fatally to the loss of essential knowledge and earthly equilibrium through the euphoria engendered by a completely unrealistic autodivinization of man. sophiaperennis: Aristotle

For Plato, philosophy is the knowledge of the Immutable and of the Ideas; and for Aristotle, it is the knowledge of first causes and principles, together with the sciences that are derived from them. sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and Aristotle

The Greeks, aside from the Sophists, were not rationalists properly speaking; it is true that Socrates rationalized the intellect by insisting on dialectic and thus on logic, but it could also be said that he intellectualized reason; there lies the ambiguity of Greek philosophy, the first aspect being represented by Aristotle, and the second by Plato, approximatively speaking. To intellectualize reason: this is an inevitable and altogether spontaneous procedure once there is the intention to express intellections that reason alone cannot attain; the difference between the Greeks and the Hindus is here a matter of degree, in the sense that Hindu thought is more "concrete" and more symbolistic than Greek thought. The truth is that it is not always possible to distinguish immediately a reasoner who accidentally has intuitions from an intuitive who in order to express himself must reason, but in practice this poses no problem, provided that the truth be saved. sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and Aristotle

Aristotelianism is a kind of exteriorization of Platonism, that is to say of the doctrine represented by the line Pythagoras-Socrates-Plato-Plotinus. The Middle Ages showed at times an awareness of the superiority of Plato over Aristotle; it is thus that Saint Bonaventure   attributes "wisdom" to the former and "science" to the latter. sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and Aristotle

For Heidegger  , for instance, the question of Being "proved intractable in the investigations of Plato and Aristotle" and: "what was formerly wrenched out of phenomena in a supreme effort of thought, although in a fragment ary and groping (in ersten Anläufen) manner, has long since been rendered trivial" (Sein und Zeit). Now, it is a priori excluded that Plato and Aristotle should have "discovered" their ontology by dint of "thinking"; they were, at most, the first in the Greek world to consider it useful to formulate an ontology in writing. Like all modern philosophers, Heidegger is far from being aware of the quite "indicative" and "provisional" role of "thinking" in metaphysics; and it is not surprising that this writer should, as a "thinker," misunderstand the normal function of all thought and conclude: "It is a matter of finding and following a way which allows one to arrive at the clarifi cation of the fundamental question of ontology. As for knowing whether this way is the sole way, or a good way, this can only be decided subsequently" (ibid.). It is difficult to conceive a more anti-metaphysical attitude. There is always this same prejudice of subjecting the intellect, which is qualitative in essence, to the vicissitudes of quantity, or in other words of reducing every quality from an absolute to a relative level. It is the classical contradiction of philosophers: knowledge is decreed to be relative, but in the name of what is this decree issued? sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and Aristotle

A certain underlying warrior or chivalric mentality does much to explain both the theological fluctuations and their ensuing disputes [NA: Let us not lose sight of the fact that the same causes produce the same effects in all climates - albeit to very varied extents and that India is no exception; the quarrels of sectarian Vishnuism are a case in point.] - the nature of Christ and the structure of the Trinity having been, in the Christian world, among the chief points at issue - just as it explains such narrownesses as the incomprehension and the intolerance of the ancient theologians towards Hellenism, its metaphysics and its mysteries. It is moreover this same mentality which produced, in the very bosom of the Greek tradition, the divergence of Aristotle with regard to Plato, who personified in essence the brahmana spirit inherent in the Orphic and Pythagorean tradition, [NA: It goes without saying that in the classical period - with its grave intellectual and artistic deviations - and then in its re- emergence at the time of the Renaissance, we have obvious examples of luciferianism of a warrior and chivalric, and therefore, kshatriya type. But it is not deviation proper that we have in mind here, since we are speaking on the contrary of manifestations that are normal and acceptable to Heaven, otherwise there could be no question of voluntarist and emotional upayas.] whereas the Stagirite formulated a metaphysics that was in certain respects centrifugal and dangerously open to the world of phenomena, actions, experiments and adventures. [NA: But let us not make Aristotelianism responsible for the modern world, which is due to the confluence of various factors, such as the abuses - and subsequent reactions - provoked by the unrealistic idealism of Catholicism, or such as the divergent and unreconciled demands of the Latin and Germanic mentalities; all of them converging on Greek scientism and the profane mentality.] sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and Aristotle

Platonism, which is as it were "centripetal" and unitive, opens onto the consciousness of the one and immanent Self; on the contrary, Aristotelianism, which is "centrifugal" and separative, tends to sever the world - and with it man - from its divine roots. This can serve theology inasmuch as it needs the image of a man totally helpless without dogmatic and sacramental graces; and this led St. Thomas to opt for Aristotle - as against the Platonism of St. Augustine - and to deprive Catholicism of its deepest metaphysical dimension, while at the same time immunizing it - according to the usual opinion - against all temptation to "gnosis." Be that as it may, we could also say, very schematically, that Plato represents the inward dimension, subjective extension, synthesis and reintegration, whereas Aristotle represents the outward dimension, objective extension, analysis and projection; but this does not mean that Aristotle was a rationalist in the modern sense of the word. For the ancients, in fact, "reason" is synonymous with "intellect": reasoning prolongs intellection more or less, depending upon the level of the subject matter under consideration. sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and Aristotle

In a relative sense and without wishing to underestimate Aristotle’s merits, it could be said that this philosopher "carnalized" the "divine" Plato by putting forward a metaphysics turned towards earthly experience. However, the Stagirite cannot be accused, as regards the essential, of any false idea; limitation is not error. sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and Aristotle

There are those who claim that the idea of God is to be explained only by social opportunism, without taking account of the infinite disproportion and the contradiction involved in such a hypothesis; if such men as Plato, Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas - not to mention the Prophets, or Christ or the sages of Asia - were not capable of noticing that God is merely a social prejudice or some other dupery of the kind, and if hundreds and thousands of years have been based intellectually on their incapacity, then there is no human intelligence, and still less any possibility of progress, for a being absurd by nature does not contain the possibility of ceasing to be absurd. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

In reality, the philosophia perennis, actualized in the West, though on different levels, by Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, the Fathers and the Scholastics, constitutes a definitive intellectual heritage, and the great problem of our times is not to replace them with something better - for this something could not exist according to the point of view in question here - but to return to the sources, both around us and within us, and to examine all the data of contemporary life in the light of the one, timeless truth. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

The cosmological proof of God, which is found in both Aristotle and Plato, and which consists in inferring from the existence of the world that of a transcendent, positive and infinite Cause, finds no greater favor in the eyes of those who deny the supernatural. According to these people the notion of God merely compensates, in this case, for our ignorance of causes, a gratuitous argument, if ever there was one, for the cosmological proof implies, not a purely logical and abstract supposition, hut a profound knowledge of causality. If we know what total causality is, namely the "vertical" and "descending" projection of a possibility through different degrees of existence, then we can conceive the First Cause; otherwise we cannot do so. Here again we observe that the objection arises from ignoring what is implicit: rationalists forget that "proof," on the level in question, is a key or a symbol, a means of drawing back a veil rather than of providing actual illumination; it is not by itself a leap out of ignorance and into knowledge. The principial argument "indicates" rather than "proves"; it cannot be anything more than a guideline or an aide-mémoire, since it is impossible to prove the Absolute outside itself. If "to prove" means to know something by virtue of a particular mental stratagem - but for which one would perforce remain in ignorance - then there are no possible "proofs of God"; and this, moreover, explains why one can do without them in symbolist and contemplative metaphysics. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

It is a mistake to see in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the fathers of rationalism, or even of modern thought generally; no doubt they reasoned - Shankara and Ramanuja did so as well - but they never said that reasoning is the alpha and omega of intelligence and of truth, nor a fortiori that our experiences or our tastes determine thought and have priority over intellectual intuition and logic, quod absit. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

One must react against the evolutionist prejudice which makes out that the thought of the Greeks "attained" to a certain level or a certain result, that is to say, that the triad Socrates -Plato -Aristotle represents the summit of an entirely "natural" thought, a summit reached after long periods of effort and groping. The reverse is the truth, in the sense that all the said triad did was to crystallize rather imperfectly a primordial and intrinsically timeless wisdom, actually of Aryan origin and typologically close to the Celtic, Germanic, Mazdean and Brahmanic esoterisms. There is in Aristotelian rationality and even in the Socratic dialectic a sort of "humanism" more or less connected with artistic naturalism and scientific curiosity, and thus with empiricism. But this already too contingent dialectic - and let us not forget that the Socratic dialogues are tinged with spiritual "pedagogy" and have something of the provisional in them - this dialectic must not lead us into attributing a "natural" character to intellections that are "supernatural" by definition, or "naturally supernatural". On the whole, Plato expressed sacred truths in a language that had already become profane - profane because rational and discursive rather than intuitive and symbolist, or because it followed too closely the contingencies and humours of the mirror that is the mind - whereas Aristotle placed truth itself, and not merely its expression, on a profane and "humanistic" plane. The originality of Aristotle and his school resides no doubt in giving to truth a maximum of rational bases, but this cannot be done without diminishing it, and it has no purpose save where there is a withdrawal of intellectual intuition; it is a "two-edged sword" precisely be-cause truth seems thereafter to be at the mercy of syllogisms. The question of knowing whether this constitutes a betrayal or a providential readaptation is of small importance here, and could no doubt be answered in either sense. [NA: With Pythagoras one is still in the Aryan East; with Socrates-Plato one is no longer wholly in that East - in reality neither "Eastern" nor "Western", that distinction having no meaning for an archaic Europe - but neither is one wholly in the West; whereas with Aristotle Europe begins to become speci fically "Western" in the current and cultural sense of the word. The East - or a particular East - forced an entry with Christianity, but the Aristotelian and Caesarean West finally prevailed, only to escape in the end from both Aristotle and Caesar, but by the downward path. It is opportune to observe here that all modern theological attempts to "surpass" the teaching of Aristotle can only follow the same path, in view of the falsity of their motives, whether implicit or explicit. What is really being sought is a graceful capitulation before evolutionary " scientism", before the machine, before an activist and demagogic socialism, a destructive psychologism, abstract art and surrealism, in short before modernism in all its forms - that modernism which is less and less a "humanism" since it de-humanizes, or that individualism which is ever more infra-individual. The moderns, who are neither Pythagoricians nor Vedantists, are surely the last to have any right to complain of Aristotle.] What is certain is that Aristotle’s teaching, so far as its essential content is concerned, is still much too true to be understood and appreciated by the protagonists of the "dynamic" and relativist or "existentialist" thought of our epoch. This last half plebeian, half demonic kind of thought is in contradiction with itself from its very point of departure, since to say that everything is relative or "dynamic", and therefore "in movement", is to say that there exists no point of view from which that fact can be established; Aristotle had in any case fully foreseen this absurdity. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

The body invites to adoration by its very theomorphic form, and that is why it can be the vehicle of a celestial presence that in principle is salvific; but, as Plato suggests, this presence is accessible only to the contemplative soul not dominated by passion, and independently of the question of whether the person is an ascetic or is married. Sexuality does not mean animality, except in perverted, hence sub-human, man; in the properly human man, sexuality is determined by that which constitutes man’s prerogative, as is attested, precisely, by the theomorphic form of his body. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

Thus it is illogical, to say the least, to wish to contrast the "wisdom of Christ," whose purpose is to save and not to explain, with the "wisdom of the world" - that of Plato for example - whose purpose is to explain and not to save; besides, the fact that the Platonic wisdom is not dictated by an intention to save does not imply that it is of "this world" or "of the flesh," or even that it does not contain any liberating virtue in the methodic context required by it. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

It is said nowadays of Plato, Aristotle and the Scholastics that they have been "left behind"; this means, in reality, that there is no longer anyone intelligent or normal enough to understand them, the acme of originality and emancipation being to mock things which are evident. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

For it is evident that if certain philosophers deny God - those precisely who detach reason from its roots - it is not because reason obliges them to do so, otherwise atheism would be natural to man, and otherwise a Plato or an Aristotle, who are nonetheless accused of rationalism, would not have taken the trouble to speak of God; the very structure of reason would have dispensed them from it. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

The sacred rights of the Intellect appear besides in the fact that Christians have not been able to dispense with the wisdom of Plato, and that later, the Latins found the need for recourse to Aristotelianism, as if thereby recognising that religio could not do without the element of wisdom, which a too exclusive perspective of love had allowed to fall into discredit. [NA: The ancient tendency to reduce sophie to a ’philosophy’, an ’art for art’s sake’ or a ’knowledge without love’, hence a pseudo-wisdom, has necessitated the predominance, in Christianity, of the contrary viewpoint. Love, in the sapiential perspective, is the element which surpasses simple ratiocination and makes knowledge effective; this cannot be insisted on too much.] But if knowledge is a profound need of the human spirit, it is by that very fact also a way. sophiaperennis: Platonism and Christianity

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 is in fact the Logos which directly rules the world, and thus It coincides with the Demiurge of Plato and of the Gnostics, and no less with the Hindu Trinity of the efficient Gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. sophiaperennis: Platonism and Christianity

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

For Heidegger, for instance, the question of Being "proved intractable in the investigations of Plato and Aristotle" and: "what was formerly wrenched out of phenomena in a supreme effort of thought, although in a fragmentary and groping (in ersten Anläufen) manner, has long since been rendered trivial" (Sein und Zeit). sophiaperennis: Heidegger

Now, it is a priori excluded that Plato and Aristotle should have "discovered" their ontology by dint of "thinking"; they were, at most, the first in the Greek world to consider it useful to formulate an ontology in writing. Like all modern philosophers, Heidegger is far from being aware of the quite "indicative" and "provisional" role of "thinking" in metaphysics; and it is not surprising that this writer should, as a "thinker," misunderstand the normal function of all thought and conclude: "It is a matter of finding and following a way which allows one to arrive at the clarification of the fundamental question of ontology. sophiaperennis: Heidegger

It is not surprising that the aesthetics of the rationalists admits only the art of classical Antiquity, which in fact inspired the Renaissance, then the world of the Encyclopedists of the French Revolution and, to a great extent, the entire nineteenth century. Now this art - which, by the way, Plato did not appreciate - strikes one by its combination of rationality and sensual passion: its architecture has something cold and poor about it - spiritually speaking - while its sculpture is totally lacking in metaphysical transparency and thereby in contemplative depth. [NA: In Greek art there are two errors or two limitations: the architecture expresses reasoning man inasmuch as he intends to victoriously oppose himself to virgin Nature; the sculpture replaces the miracle of profound beauty and life by a more or less superficial beauty and by marble.] It is all that the inveterately cerebral could desire. A rationalist can be right - man not being a closed system - as we have said above. In modern philosophy, valid insights can in fact be met with, notwithstanding that their general context compromises and weakens them. Thus the "categorical imperative" does not mean much on the part of a thinker who denies metaphysics and with it the transcendent causes of moral principles, and who is unaware that intrinsic morality is above all our conformity to the nature of Being. sophiaperennis: Rationalism

Rationalism, taken in its broadest sense, is the very negation of Platonic anamnesis; it consists in seeking the elements of certitude in phenomena rather than in our very being. The Greeks, aside from the Sophists, were not rationalists properly speaking; it is true that Socrates rationalized the intellect by insisting on dialectic and thus on logic, but it could also be said that he intellectualized reason; there lies the ambiguity of Greek philosophy, the first aspect being represented by Aristotle, and the second by Plato, approximatively speaking. To intellectualize reason: this is an inevitable and altogether spontaneous procedure once there is the intention to express intellections that reason alone cannot attain; the difference between the Greeks and the Hindus is here a matter of degree, in the sense that Hindu thought is more "concrete" and more symbolistic than Greek thought. The truth is that it is not always possible to distinguish immediately a reasoner who accidentally has intuitions from an intuitive who in order to express himself must reason, but in practice this poses no problem, provided that the truth be saved. Rationalism is the thought of the Cartesian "therefore," which signals a proof; this has nothing to do with the "therefore" that language demands when we intend to express a logico-ontological relationship. Instead of cogito ergo sum, one ought to say: sum quia est esse, "I am because Being is"; "because" and not "therefore." The certitude that we exist would be impossible without absolute, hence necessary, Being, which inspires both our existence and our certitude; Being and Consciousness: these are the two roots of our reality. Vedanta adds Beatitude, which is the ultimate content of both Consciousness and Being. sophiaperennis: Rationalism

The cosmic, or more particularly the earthly function of beauty is to actualize in the intelligent creature the Platonic recollection of the archetypes, right up to the luminous Night of the Infinite. [NA: According to Pythagoras and Plato, the soul has heard the heavenly harmonies before being exiled on earth, and music awakens in the soul the remembrance of these melodies.] This leads us to the conclusion that the full understanding of beauty demands virtue and is identifiable with it: that is to say, just as it is necessary to distinguish, in objective beauty, between the outward structure and the message in depth, so there is a distinguo to make, in the sensing of the beautiful, between the aesthetic sensation and the corresponding beauty of soul, namely such and such a virtue. Beyond every question of "sensible consolation" the message of beauty is both intellectual and moral: intellectual because it communicates to us, in the world of accidentality, aspects of Substance, without for all that having to address itself to abstract thought; and moral, because it reminds us of what we must love, and consequently be. In conformity with the Platonic principle that like attracts like, Plotinus states that "it is always easy to attract the Universal Soul . . . by constructing an object capable of undergoing its influence and receiving its participation. The faithful representation of a thing is always capable of undergoing the influence of its model; it is like a mirror which is capable of grasping the thing’s appearance." [NA: This principle does not prevent a heavenly influence mani festing itself incident ally or accidentally even in an image which is extremely imperfect - works of perversion and subversion being excluded - through pure mercy and by virtue of the ’exception that proves the rule".] sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

Likewise, and for even stronger reasons: the inadequate soul, that is to say, the soul not in conformity with its primordial dignity as "image of God", cannot attract the graces which favour or even constitute sanctity. According to Plato, the eye is "the most solar of instruments-’, which Plotinus comments on as follows: ’’The eye would never have been able to see the sun if it were not itself of solar nature, any more than the soul could see the beautiful if it were not itself beautiful." Platonic Beauty is an aspect of Divinity, and this is why it is the "splendour of the True": this amounts to saying that Infinity is in some fashion the aura of the Absolute, or that Maya is the shakti of Atma, and that consequently every hypostasis of the absolute Real - whatever be its degree - is accompanied by a radiance which we might seek to define with the help of such notions as "harmony", "beauty", "goodness", "mercy" and "beatitude". sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

... it is normal for humanity to live in a symbol, which is a pointer towards heaven, an opening towards the Infinite. As for modem science it has pierced the protecting frontiers of this symbol and by so doing destroyed the symbol itself; it has thus abolished this pointer, this opening, even as the modem world in general breaks through the space-symbols constituted by traditional civilizations; what it terms ’stagnation’ and ’sterility’ is really the homogeneity and continuity of the symbol. [NA: Neither India nor the Pythagoreans practiced modern science, and to isolate where they are concerned the elements of rational technique reminiscent of our science from the metaphysical elements which bear no resemblance to it is an arbitrary and violent operation contrary to real objectivity. When Plato is decanted in this way he retains no more than an anecdotal interest, whereas his whole doctrine aims at installing man in the supra-temporal and supradiscursive life of thought of which both mathematics and the sensory world can be symbols. If, then, peoples have been able to do without our autonomous science for thousands of years and in every climate, it is because this science is not necessary; if it has appeared as a phenomenon of civilization suddenly and in a single place, that is to show its essentially contingent nature.’ (Fernand Brunner: Science et Réalité, Paris, 1954-)] [Understanding Islam, p. 30-31]. sophiaperennis: Science and Tradition