Intelligence, by which we comprehend the Doctrine, is either the intellect or reason; reason is the instrument of the intellect, it is through reason that man comprehends the natural phenomena around him and within himself, and it is through it that he is able to describe supernatural things — parallel to the means of expression offered by symbolism by transposing intuitive knowledge into the order of language. The function of the rational faculty can be to provoke — by means of a given concept — a spiritual intuition; reason is then the flint which makes the spark spring forth. The limit of the Inexpressible varies according to mental structures: what is beyond all expression for some, may be easily expressible for others. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy  

The modes are not always intelligible at first sight; for example, one might wonder what the relevance is of a discipline such as the Tea Ceremony, which combines ascesis with art, while being materially based on manipulations that seem a priori unimportant, but are ennobled by their sacralization. First of all, one must take into account the fact that in the Far Easterner, sensorial intuition is more developed than the speculative gift; also, that the practical sense and the aesthetic sense, as well as the taste for symbolism are at the basis of his spiritual temperament. In the Tea Ceremony, the symbolic and morally correct act — the "profound" act if one will — is supposed to bring about a sort of Platonic anamnesis or a unitive consciousness, whereas with the white man of the East and the West it is the Idea that is supposed to lead to correct and virtuous acts. The man of the yellow race goes from sensorial experience to intellection, roughly speaking, whereas with the white man, it is the converse that takes place: in starting out from concepts, or from habitual mental images, he understands and classifies phenomena, without, however, feeling the need to consciously integrate them into his spiritual life, except incidentally or when it is a question of traditionally accepted symbols. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy

All this evokes the question of the Symbol and of symbolism; what is the role of the Symbol in the economy of spiritual life? We have just shown that the object of concentration is not necessarily an Idea, but that it can also be a symbolic sign, a sound, an image or an activity: the monosyllable Om, mystical diagrams— mandalas — and images of the Divinities are in their way vehicles of consciousness of the Absolute, without the intervention of a doctrinal element; the "contemplation of the naked Lady," in certain circles of the troubadors or the Fideli d’Amore, suggests a vision of the Infinite and of Pure Being— not a seduction, but a catharsis. The pre-eminence either of the Idea or of the Symbol is a question of opportuneness rather than of principle; by the nature of things, the modes of the Path are as diverse as men are, and as complex as the human soul. But whatever be our points of departure — Idea or Symbol or their combination — there is also, and essentially, concentration on the Void, concentration made of certitude and serenity; as Shankara   said: "That which is the ceasing of mental agitation and the supreme Peacefulness that is the true Benares, and that is what I am." Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy

For a certain mysticism   met with in all traditional climates, only sentiment — not intelligence — offers the solution to the main problem of our existence, namely the meaning of life; eschatology then takes on the function of metaphysics. In this promotion of feeling, the word "truth" is still used, but it means that which liberates us while granting us a happiness that we experience as being fundamental and lasting; truth is then no longer a principle comprising the most diverse contents, it is simply a given content dogmatized; it is forgotten that the true is the nature of things, and that nothing can take precedence over this in the vision of the real. Still within this mental and moral climate, intelligence — presented as "analytical’ and "separative" — is opposed to sentiment viewed according to its synthetic and unitive aspect; and what is constructed is a deformed image of man, as if he were the victim of a deceptive intelligence, and liberated by some sentimental solution. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy

The initiatory journey comprises an Enlightenment that is produced either gradually, or at one single time, or again at the moment of death, when the psychosomatic drama favors this irruption of Light. It is, at one degree or another, Moksha, Bodhi, Satori; ecstasy is an analogous mode, but of a different order, for of itself it does not produce a lasting station. Enlightenment — which moreover presupposes persevering efforts and quite often severe trials — has often been presented as a mystery of Love, precisely because it is a question of an integral and quasi-existential reality that transcends the mental play of conjectures and conclusions; l’Amore che muove il sole e l’altre stelle. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy

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

It is from this unintelligible - and in a sense "absurd"- aspect of Maya or of Prakriti [NA: This does not mean that these two ideas are synonymous, but their juxtaposition signifies that Prakriti, the ontological "Substance", is the divine " femininity" of Maya. The masculine aspect is represented by the divine Names which, in so far as they correspond to Purusha, determine and " fertilize" Substance, in collaboration with the three fundamental tendenci es comprised in Substance (the gunas: sattwa, rajas, tamas).] that arises in the main that disturbing element which insinuates itself into our mental crystallizations as soon as they depart from their normal function, which is indicative and not exhaustive; to speak of an absolute conformity of our thought to the Real is a contradiction in terms, since our thought is not the Real and since our sense of a partial conformity to the Real implies that our thought is separated from it or different from it. sophiaperennis: Thought and mental cristallizations

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

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

There is at the same time analogy and opposition: the mind is analogous to the intellect insofar as it is a kind of intelligence, but is opposed to it by its limited, indirect and discursive character; as for the apparent limitations of the intellect, they are merely accidental and extrinsic, while the limits of the mental faculty are inherent in it. Even if the intellect cannot exteriorize the "total truth" - or rather reality - because that is in itself impossible, it can perfectly well establish points of reference which are adequate and sufficient, rather as it is possible to represent space by a circle, a cross, a square, a spiral or a point and so on. Truth and reality must not be confused: the latter relates to "being" and signifies the aseity of things, and the former relates to "knowing" - to the image of reality reflected in the mirror of the intellect - and signifies the adequation of "being" and "knowing"; it is true that reality is often designated by the word "truth," but this is a dialectical synthesis which aims at defining truth in relation to its virtuality of "being," of "reality." sophiaperennis: What is the intellect and Intellection?

Logic is nothing other than the science of mental coordination, of rational conclusion; hence it cannot attain to the universal and the transcendent by its own resources; a supralogical - but not "illogical" - dialectic based on symbolism and on analogy, and therefore descriptive rather than ratiocinative, may be harder for some people to assimilate, but it conforms more closely to transcendent realities. sophiaperennis: Use and limit of Logic

Such propensities hide the distinction between the "lived vision" of the sage and the mental virtuosity of the profane "thinker"; everywhere we see "literature", nothing but "literature", and what is more, literature of such and such a "period". sophiaperennis: Jacques Maritain  

It is only too evident that mental effort does not automatically give rise to the perception of the real; the most capable mind may be the vehicle of the grossest error. sophiaperennis: Mental effort and Philosophy

The paradoxical phenomenon of even a "brilliant" intelligence being the vehicle of error is explained first of all by the possibility of a mental operation that is exclusively "horizontal," hence lacking all awareness of "vertical" relationships; however, the definition "intelligence" still applies, because there is still a discernment between something essential and something secondary, or between a cause and an effect. sophiaperennis: Mental effort 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

In the case of those who are foremost in adopting what can only be described as pseudo-intellectual barbarism, anti-Catholic in its origin, their attitude of mind is accompanied by the unshakeable complacency of the ’connoisseur’ who arrogates to himself the role of arbiter in every field, and who treats the greatest minds of the past in the spirit of a specialist in mental diseases or a collector of insects. sophiaperennis: Philosophy and Christianity

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

It is not possible to emphasize too strongly that philosophy, in its humanistic and rationalizing and therefore current sense, consists primarily of logic; this definition of Guénon’s correctly situates philosophical thought in making clear its distinction from "intellectual intuition," which is direct perception of truth. But another distinction must also be established on the rational plane itself: logic can either operate in accordance with an intellection or on the contrary put itself at the disposal of an error, so that philosophy can become the vehicle of just about anything; it may be an Aristotelianism conveying ontological knowledge, just as it may degenerate into an existentialism in which logic is no more than a blind, unreal activity, and which can rightly be described as an "esoterism of stupidity." When unintelligence - and what we mean by this is in no way incompatible with "worldly" intelligence - joins with passion to prostitute logic, it is impossible to escape a mental satanism which destroys the very basis of intelligence and truth. sophiaperennis: Reason and Intellection

In other words, philosophy ignores what would be its own negation; moreover, it concerns itself solely with mental ’schemes’ which, with its claim to universality, it likes to regard as absolute, although from the point of view of spiritual realization these schemes are merely so many virtual or potential and unused objects, in so far at least as they refer to true ideas; when, however, this is not the case, as practically always occurs in modern philosophy, these schemes are reduced to the condition of mere devices that are unusable from a speculative point of view and are therefore without any real value. sophiaperennis: What is the understanding of an idea?

In Plotinus   the essence of Platonism   reveals itself without any reserves. Here one passes from the passion-centered body to the virtuous soul and from the soul to the cognizant Spirit, then from and through the Spirit to the suprarational and unitive vision of the ineffable One, which is the source of all that exists; in the One the thinking subject and the object of thought coincide. The One projects the Spirit as the sun projects light and heat: that is to say, the Spirit, Nous, emanates eternally from the One and contemplates It. By this contemplation the Spirit actualizes in itself the world of the archetypes or ideas - the sum of essential or fundamental possibilities - and thereafter produces the animic world; the latter in its turn engenders the material world - this dead end where the reflections of the possibilities coagulate and combine. The human soul, brought forth by the One from the world of the archetypes, recognizes these in their earthly reflections, and it tends by its own nature toward its celestial origin. With Aristotle, we are much closer to the earth, though not yet so close as to find ourselves cut off from heaven. If by rationalism is meant the reduction of the intelligence to logic alone and hence the negation of intellectual intuition (which in reality has no need of mental supports even though they may have to be used for communicating perceptions of a supramental order), then it will be seen that Aristotelianism is a rationalism in principle but not absolutely so in fact, since its theism and hylomorphism depend on Intellection and not on reasoning alone. [NA: Hylomorphism is a plausible thesis, but what is much less plausible is the philosopher’s opposition of this thesis to the Platonic Ideas, of which it is really only a prolongation, one that tends to exteriorize things to a dangerous degree just because of the absence of those Ideas.] And this is true of every philosophy that conveys metaphysical truths since an unmitigated rationalism is possible only where these truths or intellections are absent. [NA: Kantian theism does not benefit from this positive reservation; for Kant  , God is only a "postulate of practical reason," which takes us infinitely far away from the real and transcendent God of Aristotle.] sophiaperennis: Plato

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

Every language is a soul, said Aristotle; that is to say a psychic or mental dimension. There are languages that are parallel, such as French and Italian, as there are those that are complementary, such as French and German; it could also be said that there are linguistic families, hence genera, that on the one hand include and on the other exclude. sophiaperennis: Aristotle

God is both unknowable and knowable, a paradox which implies - on pain of absurdity - that the relationships are different, first of all on the plane of mere thought and then in virtue of everything that separates mental knowledge from that of the heart; the first is a "perceiving," and the second a "being." "The soul is all that it knows," said Aristotle; it is necessary to add that the soul is able to know all that it is; and that in its essence it is none other than That which is, and That which alone is. sophiaperennis: 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 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

The most specifically modern thought readily makes the mistake of introducing the psychological notion of ’genius’ into the intellectual sphere, a sphere which is exclusively that of truth. In the name of ’genius’ every distortion of the normal functioning of the intelligence seems to be permitted and the most elementary logic is more and more readily rejected on the ground that it is lacking in originality and therefore ’tedious’, ’tiresome’ or ’pedantic’. However it is not the person who applies principles who is the pedant, but only the person who applies them badly; moreover the ’creative genius’, by a curious derogation of his ’inspiration’, is never short of ’principles’ when he needs some illusory pretexts for gratifying his mental passions. sophiaperennis: Philosophy and modern times

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. And just as matter and machines are quantitative, so man too becomes quantitative: the human is henceforth the social. It is forgotten that man, by isolating himself, can cease to be social, whereas society, whatever it may do - and it is in fact incapable of acting of itself - can never cease to be human. sophiaperennis: Philosophy and modern times

Kantians will ask us to prove the existence of this way of knowing (intellection of archetypes); and herein is the first error, namely that only what can be proved de facto is knowledge; the second error, which immediately follows the first, is that a reality that one cannot prove - that is to say which one cannot make accessible to some artificial and ignorant mental demand - by reason of this apparent lack of proof, does not and cannot exist. Integral rationalism lacks intellectual objectivity as much as moral impartiality.(2) sophiaperennis: Kantianism

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

Logic is nothing other than the science of mental coordination, of rational conclusion; hence it cannot attain to the universal and the transcendent by its own resources; a supralogical - but not "illogical" - dialectic based on symbolism and on analogy, and therefore descriptive rather than ratiocinative, may be harder for some people to assimilate, but it conforms more closely to transcendent realities. sophiaperennis: Logic

... Rationalism admits as true only what can be proven, without taking into account on the one hand that truth is independent of our willingness to admit it or not, and on the other hand that a proof is always in proportion to a need for causality, so that there are truths that cannot be proven to everybody; strictly speaking, rationalist thought admits something not because it is true, but because it can be proven—or appear to be proven—which amounts to saying that for rationalism dialectic outweighs truth, in fact, if not in theory. Specifically rationalist thought, moreover, readily overlooks the fact that there are mental needs due only to a deviation or a hypertrophy and which are consequently unable to provide legitimate points of departure for axiomatic formulations: if blind men could see light they would not dream of asking for proofs of its existence. sophiaperennis: Rationalism

In proportion to the loftiness of its aspects, Truth wishes to be "seen" and not simply "thought"; when it is a question of transcendent truths, the mental operation can have only two functions, which are rather the positive and negative modes of one function: to contribute to the individual’s assimilation of the intellectual vision, and to eliminate the mental obstacles that interfere with this vision, or in other words, that veil "the Eye of the Heart." sophiaperennis: Rationalism

Because of his objective and hence total intelligence, homo sapiens is necessarily homo faber; he not only has the gift of speech, he also has the gift of mental and artistic creation. It is natural for man to imitate nature, for being "made in the image of God," he has the capacity and the right to create; but it is not natural for him to imitate nature in a total fashion, since he is man, not God. sophiaperennis: ART, ITS DUTIES AND ITS RIGHTS

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

At the opposite pole to this utilitarian sophism is situated another error, which paradoxically resembles the former in its exaggeration and intolerance, and has even contributed to its development in conformity with the undulatory movement of so-called progress, and this is "classical" and "academic" aestheticism. [NA: It has also provoked the art called " abstract," which proves once again that the " evolution" of the West consists in descending from one extreme to the other. It is ridiculous to despise " academicism" in the name of the art that is at the moment accepted as "modern"; all such judgments depend on fashion and proceed from no objective criterion. Critics no longer work with anything but wholly extrinsic pseudocriteria, such as contemporaneity or novelty, as if a masterpiece were a masterpiece for a reason situated outside itself.] According to this way of looking at things, there exists a unique and exclusive canon of human and artistic beauty, an "ideal beauty" in which beauty of form and of content and of kind coincide. This third point is contestable, if not wholly false, for the "kind," in direct proportion to the elevation of its rank, comprises a whole scale of perfect types, diversified so far as their mode is concerned, but aesthetically equivalent. There can be no question, therefore, of a combing out of individuals so as to obtain a single ideal type, either within humanity as a whole, where the point is self-evident since the races exist, or even within a single race, since the races are complex. The "canons of beauty" are either a matter of sculptural or pictorial style, or a matter of taste and habit, if not of prejudice. In this last case, they are connected more or less with the instinct of self-preservation of a racial group, so that the question is one of natural selection and not of intelligence nor of aesthetics; aesthetics is an exact science and not the mental expression of a biological fatality. These general remarks apply, mutatis mutandis, to the whole domain of the beautiful, and they have a bearing even beyond that domain, in the sense that there may be affinities, and a need for complementary compensations, on every plane of intelligence and of sensibility, and notably on the plane of spiritual life. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

It has often been noticed that Oriental peoples, including those reputed to be the most artistic, show themselves for the most part entirely lacking in aesthetical discernment with regard to whatever comes to them from the West. All the ugliness born of a world more and more devoid of spirituality spreads over the East with unbelievable facility, not only under the influence of politico-economic factors, which would not be so surprising, but also by the free consent of those who, by all appearances, had created a world of beauty, that is a civilization, in which every expression, including the most modest, bore the imprint of the same genius. Since the very beginning of Western infiltration, it has been astonishing to see the most perfect works of art set side by side with the worst trivialities of industrial production, and these disconcerting contradictions have taken place not only in the realm of ’art products’, but in nearly every sphere, setting aside the fact that in a normal civilization, everything accomplished by man is related to the domain of art, in some respects at least. The answer to this paradox is very simple, however, and we have already outlined it in the preceding pages: it resides in the fact that forms, even the most unimportant, are the work of human hands in a secondary manner only; they originate first and foremost from the same supra-human source from which all tradition originates, which is another way of saying that the artist who lives in a traditional world devoid of ’rifts’, works under the discipline or the inspiration of a genius which surpasses him; fundamentally he is but the instrument of this genius, if only from the fact of his craftsman’s qualification. [NA: ’A thing is not only what it is for the senses, but also what it represents. Natural or artifi cial objects are not . . . arbitrary " symbols" of such or such a different or superior reality; but they are.., the effective manifestation of that reality: the eagle or the lion, for example, is not so much the symbol or the image of the Sun as it is the Sun under one of its manifest ations (the essential form being more important than the nature in which it manifests itself); in the same way, every house is the world in effigy and every altar is situated at the centre of the earth . . . ’ (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: ’The Primitive Mentality’ in Etudes Traditionnelles, Paris, Chacornac, August-September-October, 1939). It is solely and exclusively traditional art - in the widest sense of the word, implying all that is of an externally formal order, and therefore a fortiori everything which belongs in some way or other to the ritual domain - it is only this art, transmitted with tradition and by tradition, which can guarantee the adequate analogical correspondence between the divine arid the cosmic orders on the one hand, and the human or ’artistic’ order on the other. As a result, the traditional artist does not limit himself simply to imitating Nature, but to ’imitating Nature in her manner of operation’ (St. Thomas Aquinas, Sum. Theol. I, qu. 117, a. I) and it goes without saying that the artist cannot, with his own individual means, improvise such a ’cosmological’ operation. It is by the entirely adequate conformity of the artist to this ’manner of operation’, a conformity which is subordinated to the rules of tradition, that the masterpiece is created; in other words, this conformity essentially presupposes a knowledge, which may be either personal, direct and active, or inherited, indirect and passive, the latter case being that of those artisans who, unconscious as individuals of the metaphysical content of the forms they have learned to create, know not how to resist the corrosive influence of the modern West.] Consequently, individual taste plays only a relatively subordinate part in the production of the forms of such an art, and this taste will be reduced to nothing as soon as the individual finds himself face to face with a form which is foreign to the spirit of his own Tradition; that is what happens in the case of a people unfamiliar with Western civilization when they encounter the forms imported from the West. However, for this to happen, it is necessary that the people accepting such confusion should no longer be fully Conscious of their own spiritual genius, or in other terms, that they should no longer be capable of understanding the forms with which they are still surrounded and in which they live; it is in fact a proof that the people in question are already suffering from a certain decadence. Because of this fact, they are led to accept modern ugliness all the more easily because it may answer to certain inferior possibilities that those people are already spontaneously seeking to realize, no matter how, and it may well be quite subconsciously; therefore, the unreasoning readiness with which only too many Orientals (possibly even the great majority) accept things which are utterly incompatible with the spirit of their Tradition is best explained by the fascination exercised over an ordinary person by something corresponding to an as yet unexhausted possibility, this possibility being, in the present case, simply that of arbitrariness or want of principle. However that may be, and without wishing to attach too much importance to this explanation of what appears to be the complete lack of taste shown by Orientals, there is one fact which is absolutely certain, namely that very many Orientals themselves no longer understand the sense of the forms they inherited from their ancestors, together with their whole Tradition. All that has just been said applies of course first and foremost and a fortiori to the nations of the West themselves who, after having created - we will not say ’invented’- a perfect traditional art, proceeded to disown it in favour of the residues of the individualistic and empty art of the Graeco-Ro mans, which has finally led to the artistic chaos of the modern world. We know very well that there are some who will not at any price admit the unintelligibility or the ugliness of the modern world, and who readily employ the word ’aesthetic’, with a derogatory nuance similar to that attaching to the words ’picturesque’ and ’romantic’, in order to discredit in advance the importance of forms, so that they may find themselves more at ease in the enclosed system of their own barbarism. Such an attitude has nothing surprising in it when it concerns avowed modernists, but it is worse than illogical, not to say rather despicable, coming from those who claim to belong to the Christian civilization; for to reduce the spontaneous and normal language of Christian art - a language the beauty of which can hardly be questioned - to a worldly matter of ’taste’- as if medieval art could have been the product of mere caprice - amounts to admitting that the signs stamped by the genius of Christianity on all its direct and indirect expressions were only a contingency unrelated to that genius and devoid of serious importance, or even due to a mental inferiority; for ’only the spirit matters’- so say certain ignorant people imbued with hypocritical, iconoclastic, blasphemous and impotent puritanism, who pronounce the word ’spirit’ all the more readily because they are the last to know what it really stands for. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

In the preceding paragraphs, we have already implicitly answered the question as to whether sacred art is meant to cater for the intellectual elite alone, or whether it has something to offer to the man of average intelligence. This question solves itself when one takes into consideration the universality of all symbolism, for this universality enables sacred art to transmit - apart from metaphysical truths and facts derived from sacred history - not only spiritual states of the mind, but psychological attitudes which are accessible to all men; in modern parlance, one might say that such art is both profound and ’naïve’ at the same time, and this combination of profundity and ’naivety’ is precisely one of the dominant characteristics of sacred art. The ’ingenuousness’ or ’candour’ of such art, far from being due to a spontaneous or affected inferiority, reveals on the contrary the normal state of the human soul, whether it be that of the average or of the aboveaverage man; the apparent ’intelligence’ of naturalism, on the .other hand, that is to say, its wellnigh satanic skill in copying Nature and thus transmitting nothing but the hollow shell of beings and things, can only correspond to a deformed mentality, we might say to one which has deviated from primordial simplicity or ’innocence’. It goes without saying that such a deformation, resulting as it does from intellectual superficiality and mental virtuosity, is incompatible with the traditional spirit and consequently finds no place in a civilization that has remained faithful to that spirit. Therefore if sacred art appeals to contemplative intelligence, it likewise appeals to normal human sensibility. This means that such art alone possesses a universal language, and that none is better fitted to appeal, not only to an elite, but also to the people at large. Let us remember, too, as far as the apparently ’childish’ aspect of the traditional mentality is concerned, Christ’s injunction to be ’as little children’ and ’simple as doves’, words which, no matter what may be their spiritual meaning, also quite plainly refer to psychological realities. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

One of the functions of dress is, no doubt, to isolate mental subjectivity, that which thinks and speaks, from the two existential subjectivities which risk disturbing the message of thought with their own messages; but this is nonetheless a question of temperament and custom, more or less primordial man having in this respect reflexes other than those of man too marked by the fall; of man become at once too cerebral and too passional, and having lost much of his beauty and also his innocence. The gait of the human being is as evocative as his vertical posture; whereas the animal is horizontal and only advances towards itself - that is, it is enclosed within its own form - man, in advancing, transcends himself; even his forward movement seems vertical, it denotes a pilgrimage towards his Archetype, towards the celestial Kingdom, towards God. The beauty of the anterior side of the human body indicates the nobleness, on the one hand of man’s vocational end, and on the other hand of his manner of approaching it; it indicates that man directs himself towards God and that he does so in a manner that is "humanly divine," if one may say so. But the posterior side of the body also has its meaning: it indicates, on the one hand the noble innocence of the origin, and on the other hand the noble manner of leaving behind himself what has been transcended; it expresses, positively, whence we have come and, negatively, how we turn our backs to what is no longer ourselves. Man comes from God and he goes towards God; but at the same time, he draws away from an imperfection which is no longer his own and draws nearer to a perfection which is not yet his. His "becoming" bears the imprint of a "being"; he is that which he becomes, and he becomes that which he is. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

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: Science and technique, industry, machines

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

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

Psychoanalysis first of all eliminates those transcendent factors that make the essence of man and then replaces the complexes of inferiority or frustration by complexes of complacency and egotism ; it allows one to sin calmly and with assurance, and to damn oneself with serenity.... In fact, the mental attitude created and disseminated by psychoanalysis consists in refusing to engage in a logical or intellectual dialogue alone worthy of human beings, and in answering questions obliquely by means of insolent conjectures... (Logic and Transcendence, p. 11).. sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism