Just as the ether is present in each of the sensible elements, such as fire and water, and just as intelligence is present in each of the mental faculties, such as imagination and memory, so gnosis is necessarily present in each of the great religions, whether we grasp its traces or not. sophiaperennis: Gnosis

Creation - or "creations" - should then be represented not as a process of transformism taking place in "matter" in the naively empirical sense of the word, but rather as an elaboration by the life-principle, that is to say, something rather like the more or less discontinuous productions of the imagination: images arise in the soul from a non-formal substance with no apparent link between them; it is not the images which transform themselves, it is the animic substance which causes their arising and creates them. That man should appear to be the logical issue, not indeed of an evolution, but of a series of "sketches" more and more centered on the human form - sketches of which the apes seem to represent disparate vestiges - this fact, or this hypothesis, in no way signifies that there is any common measure, thus a kind of psychological continuity, between man and the anthropomorphic and in some sense "embryonic" bodies which may have preceded him. The coming of man is a sudden "descent" of the Spirit into a receptacle that is perfect and definitive because it conforms to the manifestation of the Absolute; the absoluteness of man is like that of the geometrical point, which, strictly speaking, is quantitatively unattainable starting from the circumference. [NA: The same thing is repeated in the womb: as soon as the body is formed the immortal soul is suddenly fixed in it like a flash of lightning, so that there is complete discontinuity between this new being and the embryonic phases which have prepared its coming. It has quite rightly been maintained, against transformism, not only that "the greater cannot come from the less" (Guénon), but also that even though something existent may gain more precision or become atrophied, there cannot on the other hand be a motive, in a species, for the adjunction of a new element, not to mention that nothing could guarantee the hereditary character of such an element (according to Schubert  -Soldern).] [Stations of Wisdom, p.89]. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

Again, if present-day man had at long last arrived at truth, he would have to be proportionately superior to the men of former times, and the disproportion between the two would be well-nigh absolute. Now the least that can be said is that the men of ancient or mediaeval times were neither less intelligent nor less virtuous than modern man. The ideology of progress is one of those absurdities that are as remarkable for the lack of imagination as for the total lack of sense of proportion they display; this is, moreover, essentially a vaishya illusion, rather like that of ’culture’, which is nothing more than intellectuality stripped of intelligence. [Castes and Races, p.28-30]. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

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

At all events, no infallibility exists which a priori encompasses all possible contingent domains; omniscience is not a human possibility. No one can be infallible with regard to unknown, or insufficiently known, phenomena; one may have an intuition for pure principles without having one for a given phenomenal order, that is to say, without being able to apply the principles spontaneously in such and such a domain. The importance of this possible incapacity diminishes to the extent that the phenomenal domain envisaged is secondary and, on the contrary, that the principles infallibly enunciated are essential. One must forgive small errors on the part of one who offers great truths - and it is the latter that determine how small or how great the errors are - whereas it would obviously be perverse to forgive great errors when they are accompanied by many small truths. [NA: There is certainly no reason to admire a science which counts insects and atoms but is ignorant of God; which makes an avowal of not knowing Him and yet claims omniscience by principle. It should be noted that the scientist, like every other rationalist, does not base himself on reason in itself; he calls " reason" his lack of imagination and knowledge, and his ignorances are for him the " data" of reason. 2 . Always respect ful of this form, the Holy Spirit will not teach a Moslem theologian the subtleties of trinitarian theology nor those of Vedanta; from another angle, it will not change a raci al or ethnic mentality; neither that of the Romans in view of Catholicism, nor that of the Arabs in view of Islam. Humanity must not only have its history, but also its stories.] sophiaperennis: The notion of philosophy

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

Certain arguments against eternal life are thoroughly typical of the "concretist" perversion of the intelligence and the imagination: to exist, they say, is to measure oneself against limits; it is to conquer resistances and to produce something. They have evidently no conception of the possibility of an existence that is incorporated in active Immutability, or in immutable Activity and that lives by it; the touchstone of the real for the materialists is always gross experience coupled with the "hylic’s" lack of imagination; on this level of thought there is nothing but "boredom" to be seen in eternal life, which brings us to the monologue attributed metaphorically by Kant   to the Divine Person who, in taking note of his eternity, would, so it is supposed, logically be obliged to raise the question of his own origin. sophiaperennis: Kantianism

Thus, it is upon an intellectual infirmity that these thinkers build their systems, without their appearing to be in the least impressed by the fact that countless men as intelligent as themselves (to put it mildly) have thought otherwise than they do. How, for example, did a man like Kant explain to himself the fact that his thesis, so immensely important for humankind, if it were true, was unknown to all the peoples of the world and had not been discovered by a single sage, and how did he account for the fact that men of the highest abilities labored under lifelong illusions (in his eyes) which were totally incompatible with those abilities - even founding religions, producing sanctity, and creating civilizations? Surely the least one might ask of a "great thinker" is a little imagination. sophiaperennis: Kantianism

The philosopher, who in other respects displays so little of the poet, does nevertheless have enough poetic imagination to describe conclusions of this kind as "sophistical mirages" (sophistische Blendwerke); that a reasoning might simply be the logical and provisional description of an intellectual evidence, and that its function might be the actualization of this evidence, in itself supralogical, apparently never crosses the minds of pure logicians. sophiaperennis: Kantianism

Now in the first place, really to think, to think intelligently, and not merely to juxtapose figurative or question-begging propositions implies by definition "thinking abstractly," since otherwise thought would be reduced to imagination; and in the second place, there is no fundamental opposition between the two poles of existing and "thin king," since our existence is always a mode of consciousness for us and our thought is a manner of existing. sophiaperennis: Kierkegaard  

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: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

Sacred art is vertical and ascending, whereas profane art is horizontal and equilibrating. In the beginning, nothing was profane; each tool was a symbol, and even decoration was symbolistic and sacral. With the passage of time, however, the imagination increasingly spread itself on the earthly plane, and man felt the need for an art that was for him and not for Heaven alone; the earth too, which in the beginning was experienced as a prolongation or an image of Heaven, progressively became earth pure and simple, that is to say that the human being increasingly felt himself to possess the right to be merely human. If religion tolerates this art, it is because it nevertheless has its legitimate function in the economy of spiritual means, within the horizontal or earthly dimension, and with the vertical or heavenly dimension in view. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

When one compares the different European costumes over the centuries, one is struck by the irruption of worldliness that occurs towards the end of the Middle Ages, and one is astonished that believing men, supposed to fear God, could have been to such a degree dupes of their vanity, their self-satisfaction, their lack of critical sense and spiritual imagination, or indeed dignity. Female dress, whether that of princesses or simply that of ordinary women, retains its sober beauty up to the end of the 14th century approximately, then becomes complicated, pretentious and extravagant, - with certain intermittent exceptions, often very sumptuous be it said, - to reach, in the 18th century, an inhuman limit of inflatedness and perversity; then, after the French revolution, one returns to ancient simplicity, but thereafter there is a slide into new excesses, whose more or less democratic spirit does not prevent complication and grotesqueness, in short, a worldly pretentiousness deprived of all innocence. As regards male dress, it also undergoes an almost equally sudden decline in the 15th century: it loses its religious character and its sober dignity and becomes affected, - "courtly", if you will - but in any case tainted with narcissism, or else it becomes simply fantastical, so much so that the men of those times, if they do not look like dandies, make one think of court jesters. All this is explained in part by the unrealistic and clumsy scission between a religious world and a secular world, the latter never having been integrated normally into the religion, whence the Renaissance on the one hand and the Reformation on the other. The specifically worldly character of male dress subsequently becomes even more accentuated and gives rise, throughout history and in the same way as female dress, to an unbalanced lurching between contrary excesses, ending with the sort of barbarous nothingness that prevails in our own age. [NA: What we say of clothes holds good equally for interior fittings, especially furniture. It is hardly credible that the same men that made the marvels of sober majesty that are gothic and nordic furniture, could have creat ed and tolerated the lacquered and gilded horrors of the courtly and bourgeois furniture of the 18th century; that the noble and robust gravity of the works of the middle ages could have given way to the miserable affectation of later works; in short, that utility and dignity should have been replaced by a hollow, trivial and flaunting luxuriousness.] sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

In saying this, we know only too well that visual criteria are devoid of significance for the "man of our time", who is nevertheless a visual type by curiosity as well as from an incapacity to think, or through lack of imagination and also through passivity: in other words he is a visual type in fact but not by right. The modern world, slipping hopelessly down the slope of an irremediable ugliness, has furiously abolished both the notion of beauty and the criteriology of forms; this is, from our point of view, yet another reason for using the present argument, which is like the complementary outward pole of metaphysical orthodoxy, for, as we have mentioned elsewhere in this connection, "extremes meet". There can be no question, for us, of reducing cultural forms, or forms as such, objectively to hazards and subjectively to tastes; "beauty is the splendour of truth"; it is an objective reality which we may or may not understand. [NA: What is admirable in the Orthodox Church is that all its forms, from the iconostases to the vestments of the priests, immediately suggest the ambience of Christ and the Apostles, whereas in what might be called the post-Gothic Catholic Church too many forms are expressions of ambiguous civilizationism or bear its imprint, that is, the imprint of this sort of parallel pseudo-religion which is "Civilization" with a capital C: the presence of Christ then becomes largely abstract. The argument that " only the spirit matters" is hypocrisy, for it is not by chance that a Christian priest wears neither the toga of a Siamese bonze nor the loin-cloth of a Hindu ascetic. No doubt the " cloth does not make the monk"; but it expresses, manifests and asserts him!] One may wonder what would have become of Latin Christianity if the Renaissance had not stabbed it. Doubtless it would have undergone the same fate as the Eastern civilizations: it would have fallen asleep on top of its treasures, becoming in part corrupt and remaining in part intact. It would have produced, not "reformers" in the conventional sense of the word - which is without any interest to say the least - but "renewers" in the form of a few great sages and a few great saints. Moreover, the growing old of civilizations is a human phenomenon, and to find fault with it is to find fault with man as such. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

Be that as it may, we should like to point out here that the chronic imbalance that characterizes Western humanity has two principal causes, the antagonism between Aryan paganism and Semitic Christianity on the one hand, and the antagonism between Latin rationality and Germanic imaginativeness on the other. [NA: From the point of view of spiritual worth, it is contemplativity that is decisive, whether it is combined with reason or with imagination, or with any kind of sensibility.] The Latin Church, with its sentimental and unrealistic idealism, has created a completely unnecessary scission between clergy and laity, whence a perpetual uneasiness on the part of the latter towards the former; it has moreover, without taking account of their needs and tastes, imposed on the Germanic peoples too many specifically Latin solutions, forgetting that a religious and cultural framework, in order to be effective, must adapt itself to the mental requirements of those on whom it is imposed. And since, in the case of Europeans, their creative gifts far exceed their contemplative gifts - the role of Christianity should have been to re-establish equilibrium by accentuating contemplation and canalizing creativity, - the West excels in "destroying what it has worshipped"; also the history of Western civilization is made up of cultural treacheries that are difficult to understand, - one is astonished at so much lack of understanding, ingratitude and blindness, - and these treacheries appear most visibly, it goes without saying, in their formal manifestations, in other words, in the human ambience which, in normal conditions, ought to suggest a sort of earthly Paradise or heavenly Jerusalem, with all their beatific symbolism and stability. The Renaissance, at its apogee, replaces happiness with pride; the baroque reacts against this pride or this crushing coldness with a false happiness, cut off from its divine roots and full of a bragadoccio that is both exaggerated and frenzied. The reaction to this reaction was a pagan classicism leading to the bourgeois ugliness, both crude and mediocre, of the 19th century; this has nothing to do with the real people or with a popular craftsmanship that is still authentic, and which remains more or less on the margin of history and bears witness to a wholesomeness very far from all civilizationist affectation. [NA: Popular art moreover is often the vehicle of primordial, especially solar, symbols, and one finds it in peoples very far removed from one another, sometimes in forms that are identical down to the last detail.] sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

The monks of the eighth century, very different from those religious authorities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who betrayed Christian art by abandoning it to the impure passions of worldly men and the ignorant imagination of the profane, were fully conscious of the holiness of every kind of means able to express the Tradition. They stipulated, at the second council of Nicaea, that ’art’ (i.e. ’the perfection of work’) alone belongs to the painter, while ordinance (the choice of the subject) and disposition (the treatment of the subject from the symbolical as well as the technical or material points of view) belongs to the Fathers. (Non est pictoris - ejus enim sola ars est-rerum ordinatio et dispositio Patrum nostrorum.) This amounts to placing all artistic initiative under the direct and active authority of the spiritual leaders of Christianity. Such being the case, how can one explain the fact that during recent centuries, religious circles have for the most part shown such a regret table lack of understanding in respect of all those things which, having an artistic character, are, as they fondly believe, only external matters? First of all, admitting a priori the elimination of every esoteric influence, there is the fact that a religious perspective as such has a tendency to identify itself with the moral point of view, which stresses merit only and believes it is neces sary to ignore the sanctifying quality of intellectual knowledge and, as a result, the value of the supports of such knowledge; now, the perfection of sensible forms is no more ’meritorious in the moral sense than the intellections which those forms reflect and transmit, and it is therefore only logical that symbolic forms, when they are no longer understood, should be relegated to the background, and even forsaken, in order to be replaced by forms which will no longer appeal to the intelligence, but only to a sentimental imagination capable of inspiring the meritorious act - at least such is the belief of the man of limited intelligence. However, this sort of speculative provocation of reactions by resorting to means of a superficial and vulgar nature will, in the last analysis, prove to be illusory, for, in reality, nothing can be better fitted to influence the deeper dispositions of the soul than sacred art. Profane art, on the contrary, even if it be of some psychological value in the case of souls of inferior intelligence, soon exhausts its means, by the very fact of their superficiality and vulgarity, after which it can only provoke reactions of contempt; these are only too common, and may be considered as a ’rebound’ of the contempt in which sacred art was held by profane art, especially in its earlier stages. [NA: In the same way, the hostility of the representatives of exotericism for all that lies beyond their comprehension results in an increasingly ’massive’ exotericism which cannot but suffer from ’rifts’; but the ’spiritual porousness’ of Tradition - that is to say the immanence in the ’substance’ of exotericism of a transcendent ’dimension’ which makes up for its ’massiveness,’- this state of ’porousness’ having been lost, the above-mentioned ’rifts’ could only be produced from below; which means the replacement of the masters of medieval esotericism by the protagonists of modern unbelief.] It has been a matter of current experience that nothing is able to offer to irreligion a more immediately tangible nourishment than the insipid hypocrisy of religious images; that which was meant to stimulate piety in the believer, but serves to confirm unbelievers in their impiety, whereas it must be recognized that genuinely sacred art does not possess this character of a ’two-edged weapon’, for being itself more abstract, it offers less hold to hostile psychological reactions. Now, no matter what may be the theories that attribute to the people the need for unintelligent images, warped in their essence, the elites do exist and certainly require something different; what they demand is an art corresponding to their own spirit and in which their soul can come to rest, finding itself again in order to mount to the Divine. Such an art cannot spring simply from profane taste, nor even from ’genius’, but must proceed essentially out of Tradition; this fact being admitted, the masterpiece must be executed by a sanctified artist or, let us say, by one in a state of grace’. [NA: The icon-painters were monks who, before setting to work, prepared themselves by fasting, prayer, confession and communion; it even happened that the colours were mixed with holy water and the dust from relics, as would not have been possible had the icon not possessed a really sacramental character.] Far from serving only for the more or less superficial instruction and edification of the masses, the icon, as is the case with the Hindu yantra and all other visible symbols, establishes a bridge from the sensible to the spiritual: ’By the visible aspect’, states St. John Damascenus, ’our thoughts must be drawn up in a spiritual flight and rise to the invisible majesty of God.’ sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

There is certainly no reason to admire a science which counts insects and atoms but is ignorant of God; which makes an avowal of not knowing Him and yet claims omniscience by principle. It should be noted that the scientist, like every other rationalist, does not base himself on reason in itself; he calls "reason" his lack of imagination and knowledge, and his ignorances are for him the "data" of reason. [Sufism: Veil and Quintessence, p. 128, note 12]. sophiaperennis: Science and religious Faith

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

All its attempts at explanations regarding things of this order are vitiated basically through a defect of imagination: all things are viewed in function firstly, of empirical "matter" - even if called by some other name and secondly, of the evolutionist hypothesis, instead of primary consideration being given to the principial and "descending" emanation of "ideas" and the progressive coagulation of substances, [NA: Where the perennial philosophy says "Principle, emanation substance" modern science will say "energy, matter, evolution." ...] in conformity with the principle of individuation on the one hand and of demiurgic "solidification" on the other. One tries to explain "horizontally" that which is explainable only "in a vertical sense"; it is as though we were living in a glacial world where water was unknown and where only the Revelations mentioned it, whereas profane science would deny its existence. Such a science is assuredly cut to the measure of modern man who conceived it and who is at the same time its product; like him, it implicitly claims a sort of immunity or "extraterritoriality" in the face of the Absolute; and like him, this science finds itself cut off from any cosmic or eschatological context.[Treasures of Buddhism, p. 43-44. sophiaperennis: Limits of modern science

Pure and simple logic amounts only to a very indirect manner of knowing things; it is, before all else, the art of coordinating data (whether true or false) according to a given need of causal satisfaction and within the limits of a given imagination, so much so that an apparently faultless argument can yet be quite erroneous in function of the falseness of its premisses; the more elevated the order of the thing to be made known, the more vulnerable will be the mind in that case. sophiaperennis: Science and logic

The question of the spiritual sense underlying the myths is one of those which people gladly relegate to the realm of feeling and imagination and which "exact science" refuses to treat otherwise than through the medium of psychological and historical conjectures. [NA: Some honorable exceptions are to be found among the anthropologists of recent years, whose approach to the peoples and the folklore they study in various parts of the world is neither patronizing nor hampered by an ingrained rationalist or materialist prejudice: in short they take into account the spiritual dimension of man, at least in some degree. However, the question remains open as to how far their studies are officially admitted into the category of ’exact science’.] sophiaperennis: Science and mythologies

Pure and simple logic amounts only to a very indirect manner of knowing things; it is, before all else, the art of coordinating data (whether true or false) according to a given need of causal satisfaction and within the limits of a given imagination, so much so that an apparently faultless argument can yet be quite erroneous in function of the falseness of its premisses; the more elevated the order of the thing to be made known, the more vulnerable will be the mind in that case. sophiaperennis: Science and mythologies

According to the observations of experimental science, the blue sky which stretches above us is not a world of bliss, but an optical illusion due to the refraction of light by the atmosphere, and from this point of view, it is obviously right to maintain that the home of the blessed does not lie up there. Nevertheless it would be a great mistake to assert that the association of ideas between the visible heaven and celestial Paradise does not arise from the nature of things, but rather from ignorance and ingenuousness mixed with imagination and sentimentality; for the blue sky is a direct and therefore adequate symbol of the higher and supra-sensory degrees of Existence; it is indeed a distant reverberation of those degrees, and it is necessarily so since it is truly a symbol, consecrated by the sacred Scriptures and by the unanimous intuition of peoples. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

All errors concerning the world and God consist either in a "naturalistic" denial of the discontinuity [between God and the world] and so also of transcendence [NA: It is mainly this "scientific" prejudice, going hand in hand with a falsification and impoverishment of speculative imagination, which prevents a man like Teilhard de Chardin from conceiving the overriding discontinuity between matter and the soul, or between the natural and the supernatural orders and so leads to the evolutionary outlook, which — inverting the truth — makes everything begin with matter. A minus always presupposed an initial plus so that a seeming evolution is no more than the quite provisional unfolding of a preexisting result; the human embryo becomes a man because that is what it already is; no "evolution" will produce a man from an animal embryo. In the same way the whole cosmos can only spring from an embryonic state which contains the virtuality of all its possible deployment and simply makes manifest on the plane of contingencies an infinitely higher and transcendent prototype.] — whereas it is on the basis of this transcendence that the whole edifice of science should have been raised — or else in a failure to understand the metaphysical and ’descending’ continuity which in no way abolishes the discontinuity starting from the relative... [Understanding Islam, p. 109]. sophiaperennis: Science and negation of Transcendence

For the same reasons it also denies Revelation, which alone rebuilds the bridge broken by the fall. According to the observations of experimental science, the blue sky which stretches above us is not a world of bliss, but an optical illusion due to the refraction of light by the atmosphere, and from this point of view, it is obviously right to maintain that the home of the blessed does not lie up there. Nevertheless it would be a great mistake to assert that the association of ideas between the visible heaven and celestial Paradise does not arise from the nature of things, but rather from ignorance and ingenuousness, mixed with imagination and sentimentality; for the blue sky is a direct and therefore adequate symbol of the higher and supra-sensory degrees of Existence; it is indeed a distant reverberation of those degrees, and it is necessarily so since it is truly a symbol, consecrated by the sacred Scriptures and by the unanimous intuition of peoples. [NA: The word "symbol" implies "participation" or "aspect", whatever the difference of level may be involved.] sophiaperennis: Science and negation of Transcendence

This extravagant and pseudo-metaphysical opinion is contradicted, in the first place, by the fact that, on awakening, we remember our own dream and not someone else’s; secondly, by the fact that the inconsistent and fluid character of dreams, on the one hand, and on the other, their reference to our subjectives experiences, prove their subjectivity, their passivity and their contingency; and, thirdly, by the fact that, while dreaming, we can perfectly well be aware that we are dreaming and that it is we — and not someone else — who are dreaming. The proof of this is that it may happen that we awaken of our own free will when the development of the dream takes a disturbing turn. On the other hand, no one would think of making an effort to emerge from the waking state — however disagreeable the situation — in the hope of awakening into some paradisial state with the conviction that one had emerged from an accident of one’s own imagination, whereas in reality the terrestrial world would remain what it is. Certainly the universe is, in a sense, an illusion in relation to the Principle, but the objective world is not an illusion in relation to a particular subjectivity on the plane of relativity. (Esoterism as Principle and as Way, p.215-216). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

We must mention here the existence of false masters who, as inheritors of occultism and inspired by "realizationism" and psychoanalysis, contrive to invent implausible infirmities in order to invent extravagant remedies. What is surprising logically is that they always find dupes, even among the so-called "intellectuals"; the explanation for this is that these novelties come to fill a void that never should have been produced. In all these "methods", the point of departure is a false image of man; the goal of the training being the development — patterned after the "clairvoyance" of certain occultists — of "latent powers" or of an "expanded" or "liberated" personality. And since such an ideal does not exist — more especially as the premise is imaginary — the result of the adventure can only be a perversion; this is the price of a supersaturated rationalism — blown up to its extreme limit — namely an agnosticism devoid of all imagination. (The transfiguration of Man, p. 9) sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

We must mention here the existence of false masters who, as inheritors of occultism and inspired by "realizationism" and psychoanalysis, contrive to invent implausible infirmities in order to invent extravagant remedies. What is surprising logically is that they always find dupes, even among the so-called "intellectuals"; the explanation for this is that these novelties come to fill a void that never should have been produced. In all these "methods", the point of departure is a false image of man; the goal of the training being the development — patterned after the "clairvoyance" of certain occultists — of "latent powers" or of an "expanded" or "liberated" personality. And since such an ideal does not exist — more especially as the premise is imaginary — the result of the adventure can only be a perversion; this is the price of a supersaturated rationalism — blown up to its extreme limit — namely an agnosticism devoid of all imagination. (The transfiguration of Man, p. 9) sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

We must mention here the existence of false masters who, as inheritors of occultism and inspired by "realizationism" and psychoanalysis, contrive to invent implausible infirmities in order to invent extravagant remedies. What is surprising logically is that they always find dupes, even among the so-called "intellectuals"; the explanation for this is that these novelties come to fill a void that never should have been produced. In all these "methods", the point of departure is a false image of man; the goal of the training being the development — patterned after the "clairvoyance" of certain occultists — of "latent powers" or of an "expanded" or "liberated" personality. And since such an ideal does not exist — more especially as the premise is imaginary — the result of the adventure can only be a perversion; this is the price of a supersaturated rationalism — blown up to its extreme limit — namely an agnosticism devoid of all imagination. (The transfiguration of Man, p. 9) sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism