To say Beauty is to say Love; and it is known how important this idea of Love is in all religions and all spiritual alchemies. The reason for this is that Love is the tendency towards Union: this tendency can be a movement, either towards the Immutable, the Absolute, or towards the Limitless, the Infinite; on the plane of human relations, a particular love is the support for Love as such; and the love of man for woman can be compared to the liberating tendency towards the Divine Infinitude — woman personifying All-Possibility — whereas the love of woman for man is comparable to the stabilizing tendency towards the Divine Center, which offers all certitude and all security; however, each partner participates in the other’s position, given that each is a human being and that in this respect the sexual scission is secondary. As regards sexuality in itself, the Sufi Ibn Arabi   deems sexual union to be, in the natural order, the most adequate image of Supreme Knowledge: of Extinction in Allâh of the "Knower through Allâh." Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy  

Guénon was quite right to declare that the Vedanta is the most direct expression of pure metaphysics and, in a certain respect, the most assimilable; no attachment to any non-Hindu tradition obliges us to ignore it or to pretend to ignore it. In the realm of the monotheistic Semitic religions there is one esoterism "of fact" and another "by right"; it is the latter which - whether or not it is "seen for what it is" - corresponds to the wisdom of the Vedanta; de facto esoterism is the esoterism that has come about from what has in fact been said or written, with such veilings and side-tracking as are almost bound to be demanded by a particular framework of theology and, above all, by a particular religious upâya. It was doubtless esoterism de jure that the Qabbalists had in mind when they said that, if the esoteric tradition were lost, the sages could restore it. Essays A NOTE ON RENÉ GUÉNON

I have had occasion more than once to point out that esoterism displays two aspects, one being an extension of exoterism and the other alien to it to the point of occasionally opposing it; for if it be true that the form "is" in a certain way the essence, the essence on the contrary is by no means the form; the drop is water, but water is not the drop. "Error alone is handed on", said Lao-tzu  ; likewise, Guénon did not hesitate to say in the review "La Gnose" that the historical religions are "so many heresies" compared with the "primordial and unanimous Tradition", and he declares in "le Roi du Monde" that "true esoterism is quite another thing than outward religion and, if it has certain relationships with it, this can only be insofar as it finds a mode of symbolical expression in religious forms; it matters little, moreover, that these forms should belong to this religion or that. . ." Guénon speaks of "true esoterism", and thus admits the existence of a modified esoterism and that is what I am referring to when I speak, in certain of my books, of "average sufism"; a somewhat loose expression, but in practice adequate. Essays A NOTE ON RENÉ GUÉNON

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

The modern levelling - which may call itself ’democratic’- is the very opposite of the theocratic equality of the monotheistic religions, for it is founded, not on the theomorphisrn of man, but on his animality and his rebellion. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

If we wish to retain the limitative, or even pejorative, sense of the word philosopher, we could say that gnosis or pure metaphysics starts with certainty, whereas philosophy on the contrary starts from doubt and only serves to overcome it with the means that are at its disposal and which intend to be purely rational. But since neither the term "philosophy" in itself, nor the usage that has always been made of it, obliges us to accept only the restrictive sense of the word, we shall not censure too severely those who employ it in a wider sense than may seem opportune. [NA: Even Ananda Coomaraswamy   does not hesitate to speak of "Hindu philosophy," which at least has the advantage of making clear the " literary genre," more especially as the reader is supposed to know what the Hindu spirit is in particular and what the traditional spirit is in general. In an analogous manner, when one speaks of the "Hindu religion," one knows perfectly well that it is not a case - and cannot be a case - of a Semitic and western religion, hence refractory to every di fferentiation of perspective; thus one speaks traditionally of the Roman, Greek and Egyptian " religions," and the Koran   does not hesitate to say to the pagan Arabs: "To you your religion and to me mine," although the religion of the pagans had none of the characteristic features of Judeo-Christian monotheism.] Theory, by definition, is not an end in itself; it is only - and seeks only - to be a key for becoming conscious through the "heart." If there is attached to the notion of "philosophy" a suspicion of superficiality, insufficiency and pretension, it is precisely because all too often - and indeed always in the case of the moderns - it is presented as being sufficient unto itself. sophiaperennis: Difference between Philosophy, theology and gnosis

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

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

One of the great errors of our times is to speak of the "bankruptcy" of religion or the religions; this is to lay blame on truth for our own refusal to admit it; and by the same token it is to deny man both liberty and intelligence. Intelligence depends in large measure on the will, hence on free will, in the sense that free will can contribute towards actualizing intelligence or on the contrary paralyzing it. It was not without reason that medieval theologians located heresy in the will: intelligence can, in fact, fall into error, but its nature does not allow it to resist truth indefinitely; for this to happen it needs the intervention of a factor connected with the will, or, more precisely, with the passions, namely prejudice, sentimental bias, individualism in all its forms. There is, at the basis of every error, an element of irrational "mystique," a tendency not deriving from concepts, but making use of them or producing them: behind every limiting or subversive philosophy can be discerned a "taste" or a "color"; errors proceed from "hardenings," drynesses or intoxications. sophiaperennis: Philosophy and modern times

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

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

What is true for a certain Buddhism is true a priori for Hinduism, the sacred art of which exposes and accentuates the message of both human bodies, the masculine and the feminine: message of ascending and unitive verticality in both cases, certainly, but in rigorous, transcendent, objective, abstract, rational and mathematical mode in the first case, and in gentle, immanent, concrete, emotional and mus ical mode in the second. On the one hand, a path centered on the metaphysical Idea and Rigor, and on the other hand, a way centered on the sacramental Symbol and Gentleness; not to mention diverse combinations of the two perspectives, temperaments or methods, for the absolute male cannot exist any more than can the absolute female, given that there is but one sole anthropos. Thus, there are spiritualities, and even religions, which could be qualified as "feminine," without this character signifying that their adepts lose anything whatever of their virility; [NA: In Krishnaism, the masculine adepts consider themselves as gopis, lovers   of Krishna, which is all the more plausible in that in relation to the Divinity every creature has something feminine about it.] and the converse is equally true, for there have been women in paths which are the least representative of their mentality; both possibilities seem sufficiently evident so as to dispense us from entering into the meanders of this paradox. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

But what we would chiefly emphasize here is the error of believing that by the mere fact of its objective content ’science’ possesses the power and the right to destroy myths and religions and that it is some kind of higher experience, which kills gods and beliefs; in reality it is human incapacity to understand unexpected phenomena or to resolve certain seeming antinomies which is smothering truth and dehumanizing the world. [Understanding Islam, p. 114-115]. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

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

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

From a more individual point of view, that of mere expediency, it must be admitted that the spiritual confusion of our times has reached such a pitch that the harm that might in principle befall certain people from contact with the truths in question is compensated by the advantages other will derive from the selfsame truths; again, the term "esoterism" has been so often misused in order to cloak ideas that are as unspiritual as they are dangerous, and what is know of esoteric doctrines has been so frequently plagiarized and deformed — not to mention the fact that the outward and readily exaggerated incompatibility of the different religious forms greatly discredits, in the minds of most of our contemporaries, all religions - that it is not only desirable but even incumbent upon one to give some idea, firstly, of what true esoterism is and what it is not, and secondly, of what it is that constitutes the profound and eternal solidarity of all spiritual forms. (The Transcendent Unity of Religions, p.33-34) sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

To believe, with certain ’neo-yogists’, that ’evolution’ will produce a superman ’who will differ from a man as much as man differs from the animal or the animal from the vegetable’ is a case of not knowing what man is. Here is one more example of a pseudo-wisdom which deems itself vastly superior to the ’separatist’ religions, but which in point of fact shows itself more ignorant than the most elementary catechisms. For the most elementary catechism does know what man is: it knows that by his qualities, and as an autonomous world, he stands opposed to the other kingdoms of nature taken together; it knows that in one particular respect — that of spiritual possibilities, not that of animal nature — the difference between a monkey and a man is infinitely greater than that between a fly and a monkey. For man alone is able to leave the world; man alone is able to return to God; and that is the reason why he cannot in any way be surpassed by a new earthly being. Among the beings of this earth man is the central being; this is an absolute position; there cannot be a center more central than the center, if definitions have any meanings. sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

This neo-yogism, like other similar movements, pretends that it can add an essential value to the wisdom of our ancestors; it believes that the religions are partial truths which it is called upon to stick together, after hundreds or thousands of years of waiting, and to crown with its own naive little system. sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

... why have Sufis declared that God can be present, not only in churches and synagogues, but also in the temples of idolaters? It is because in the ’classical’ and ’traditional’ cases of paganism the loss of the full truth and of efficacy for salvation essentially results from a profound modification in the mentality of the worshippers and not from an ultimate falsity of the symbols; in all the religions which surrounded each of the three Semitic forms of monotheism, as also in those form of ’fetishism’ [NA: This word is here used only as a conventional sign to designate decadent traditions, and there is no intention of pronouncing on the value of any particular African or Melanesian tradition.] still alive today, a mentality once contemplative and so in possession of a sense of the metaphysical transparency of forms had ended by becoming passional, worldly [NA: According to the Quran the kâfir is in effect characterized by his ’worldliness’, that is, by his preference for the good things of this world and his inadvertence (ghaflah) as regards those lying beyond this world.] and, in the strict sense, superstitious. [NA: According to the Gospels the pagans imagine they will be answered ’for their much speaking’. At root ’superstition’ consists in the illusion of taking the means for the end or of worshipping forms for their own sake and not for their transcendent content.] The symbol through which the reality symbolized was originally clearly perceived — a reality of which it is moreover truly speaking an aspect — became in fact an opaque and uncomprehended image or an idol, and this falling away of the general level of mentality could not fail in its turn to react on the tradition itself, enfeebling it and falsifying it in various way; most of the ancient paganisms were indeed characterized by intoxication with power and sensuality. (Understanding Islam, p.55). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism