Metaphysical thought essentially presupposes intellection, or let us say intellectual intuition; the latter is not a matter of sentiment, of course, but of pure intelligence. Without this intuition, metaphysical speculation is reduced either to an opaque dogmatism or to an imprecise ratiocination; and quite evidently, speculative thought deprived of its intuitive foundation would be unable to prepare the ground for Gnosis: for direct, concrete and plenary Knowledge. Let us specify that the eventual gaps in the human mind are due, not to fortuitous causes, but to the very conditions of the "dark age," the kali-yuga, which has as an effect — among other modes of decadence — a progressive weakening of pure intellection and of the ascending tendencies of soul; whence the necessity of the religious Revelations, and whence also the problematical phenomenon of gratuitous and divergent philosophies. But man always remains man "made in the image of God"; nothing could prevent — even in these millennia of darkness—the flowering of wisdoms pertaining to the Sophia Perennis: such as the Upanishads  , the Brahma-Sûtras   and the Advaita-Vedânta. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy  

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

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

As regards the question of Western rationality, ... the following must be taken into account: the "critical mind," if one may so express it, developed in a world where everything is called into question and where intelligence is continually forced into a state of self-defense; whereas the East has been able to slumber in the shade of the sacred and of the conventional, in the security of a religious universe without fissures. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism

On the whole, modern philosophy is the codification of an acquired infirmity: the intellectual atrophy of man marked by the "fall" entails a hypertrophy of practical intelligence, whence in the final analysis the explosion of the physical sciences and the appearance of pseudo-sciences such as psychology and sociology. [NA In the nineteenth century, the desire to reconcile faith and reason, or the religious spirit and science, appeared in the form of occultism: a hybrid phenomenon that despite its phantasmagoria had some merits, if only by its opposition to materialism and to confessional superficiality. ] sophiaperennis: Modern definition of Philosophy

In a certain respect, the difference between philosophy, theology and gnosis is total; in another respect, it is relative. It is total when one understands by "philosophy," only rationalism; by "theology," only the explanation of religious teachings; and by "gnosis," only intuitive and intellective, and thus supra-rational, knowledge; but the difference is only relative when one understands by "philosophy" the fact of thinking, by "theology" the fact of speaking dogmatically of God and religious things, and by "gnosis" the fact of presenting pure metaphysics, for then the genres interpenetrate. It is impossible to deny that the most illustrious Sufis, while being " gnostics" by definition, were at the same time to some extent theologians and to some extent philosophers, or that the great theologians were both to some extent philosophers and to some extent gnostics, the last word having to be understood in its proper and not sectarian meaning. sophiaperennis: Difference between Philosophy, theology and gnosis

The purely ’theoristic’ understanding of an idea, which we have so termed because of the limitative tendency which paralyses it, may justly be characterized by the word ’dogmatism’; religious dogma in fact, at least to the extent to which it is supposed to exclude other conceptual forms, though certainly not in itself, represents an idea considered in conformity with a ’theoristic’ tendency, and this exclusive way of looking at ideas has even become characteristic of the religious point of view as such. sophiaperennis: What is dogmatism?

A religious dogma ceases, however, to be limited in this way once it is understood in the light of its inherent truth, which is of a universal order, and this is the case in all esotericism. On the other hand, the ideas formulated in esotericism and in metaphysical doctrines generally may in their turn be understood according to the dogmatic or ’theoristic’ tendency, and the case is then analogous to that of the religious dogmatism of which we have just spoken. sophiaperennis: What is dogmatism?

In this connection, we must again point out that a religious dogma is not a dogma in itself but solely by the fact of being considered as such and through a sort of confusion of the idea with the form in which it is clothed; on the other hand, the outward dogmatization of universal truths is perfectly justified in view of the fact that these truths or ideas, in having to provide the foundation of a tradition, must be capable of being assimilated in some degree by all men. sophiaperennis: What is dogmatism?

Infallibility, in a sense by definition, pertains in one degree or another to the Holy Spirit, in a way that may be extraordinary or ordinary, properly supernatural or quasi-natural; now the Holy Spirit, in the religious order, adapts itself to the nature of man in the sense that it limits itself to preventing the victory of intrinsic heresies, a victory which would falsify this "divine form" that is the religion; for the upaya, the "saving mirage," is willed by Heaven, not by men. sophiaperennis: The notion of philosophy

In other words, intellectual knowledge also transcends the specifically religious point of view, which is itself incomparably superior to the philosophic point of view, since, like metaphysical knowledge, it emanates from God and not from man; but whereas metaphysic proceeds wholly from intellectual intuition, religion proceeds from revelation. sophiaperennis: Difference between Metaphysics and Philosophy

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

This very rudimentary example is designed to show that the religious point of view, because it is based in the minds of believers on a revelation and not on a knowledge that is accessible to each one of them (an unrealizable condition for a large human collectivity), will of necessity confuse the symbol or form with the naked and supraformal Truth, while metaphysic, which can only be assimilated to a particular ’point of view’ in a purely provisional sense, will be able to make use of the same symbol or form as a means of expression, while being aware of its relativity. sophiaperennis: Difference between Metaphysics and Philosophy

Far from proving that modern man "keeps a cool head" and that men of old were dreamers, modern unbelief and "exact science" are to be explained at bottom by a wave of rationalism - sometimes apparently antirationalist - which is reacting against the religious sentimentalism and bourgeois romanticism of the previous epoch; both these tendencies have existed side by side since the "age of reason." The Renaissance also knew such a wave of false lucidity: like our age, it rejected truths along with outworn sentimentalities, replacing them with new sentimentalities that were supposedly "intelligent." To properly understand these oscillations it must be remembered that Christianity as a path of love opposed pagan rationalism; that is to say, it opposed emotional elements possessing a spiritual quality to the implacable, but "worldly," logic of the Greco-Romans, while later on absorbing certain sapiential elements which their civilization comprised. sophiaperennis: Nature of Modern man

Westerners are moreover compelled to admit this themselves: ’The notion of philosophy came to have a different meaning for the Eastern and Western Churches, in the sense that for the Greeks it comprised quasi organically a large proportion of religious theories (dass der Begrjff ’Philosophie’ dort ganz wesenhaft viel religiöse Weltanschauungskunde umfasste), while for the Latins it contained, intentionally or involuntarily, the seed which ultimately led to the total separation of religion and rationalist science (der zur vollkommenen Dualisierung von Religion und Gedankenwissenschaft führen sollte). sophiaperennis: Philosophy and Christianity

If on the one hand reasoning can give rise to - but not produce - intellection and if on the other hand intellection is necessarily expressed by reasoning, a third combination is also possible, but it is abnormal and abusive; namely the temptation to support a real intellection by aberrant reasoning; either because the intellection does not operate in all domains on account of some blind spot in the mind or character, or because religious emotivity involves the thought towards solutions stemming from expediency, given that faith is inclined to allow, even if only subconsciously, that "the end sanctifies the means. sophiaperennis: Reason

If on the one hand reasoning can give rise to - but not produce - intellection and if on the other hand intellection is necessarily expressed by reasoning, a third combination is also possible, but it is abnormal and abusive; namely the temptation to support a real intellection by aberrant reasoning; either because the intellection does not operate in all domains on account of some blind spot in the mind or character, or because religious emotivity involves the thought towards solutions stemming from expediency, given that faith is inclined to allow, even if only subconsciously, that "the end sanctifies the means. sophiaperennis: Reason and Intellection

To illustrate the three modes of thought we have been considering (metaphysics, philosophy, theology) let us apply them to the idea of God. The philosophical point of view, when it does not purely and simply deny God even if only by ascribing to the word a meaning it does not possess, tries to ’prove’ God by all kinds of argument; in other words, this point of view tries to ’prove’ either the ’existence’ or the ’nonexistence ’of God, as though reason, which is only an intermediary and in no wise a source of transcendent knowledge, could ’prove’ anything one wished to prove. Moreover this pretension of reason to autonomy in realms where only intellectual intuition on the one hand and revelation on the other can communicate knowledge, is characteristic of the philosophical point of view and shows up all its inadequacy. The religious point of view does not, for its part, trouble itself about proving God - it is even prepared to admit that such proof is impossible - but bases itself on belief. It must be added here that ’faith’ cannot be reduced to a simple matter of belief; otherwise Christ would not have spoken of the ’faith which moves mountains’, for it goes without saying that ordinary religious belief has no such power. Finally, from the metaphysical standpoint, there is no longer any question either of ’proof’ or of ’belief’ but solely of direct evidence, of intellectual evidence that implies absolute certainty; but in the present state of humanity such evidence is only accessible to a spiritual elite which becomes ever more restricted in number. It may be added that religion, by its very nature and independently of any wish of its representatives, who may be unaware of the fact, contains and transmits this purely intellectual Knowledge beneath the veil of its dogmatic and ritual symbols, as we have already seen. sophiaperennis: Reason and Intellection

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

A man such as Aristotle provides a classic example of a qualification that is exclusively intellectual and, by this very fact, unilateral and necessarily limited, even on the level of his genius, since perfect intellection ipso facto involves contemplation and interiorization. In the case of the Stagirite, the intelligence is penetrating but the tendency of the will is exteriorizing, in conformity moreover with the cosmolatry of the majority of the Greeks; it is this that enabled Saint Thomas to support the religious thesis regarding the "natural" character of the intelligence, so called because it is neither revealed nor sacramental, and the reduction of intelligence to reason illumined by faith, the latter alone being granted the right to be "supernatural." Not that Saint Thomas thereby excluded direct intellection, which would indeed have been impossible for him, but he enclosed it to all intents and purposes within dogmatic and rational limits, whence the paradox of an interiorizing contemplativity armed with an exteriorizing logic. sophiaperennis: Aristotle

Thus it is not surprising that from the strictly theological point of view, gnosis is the "enemy number one." By its recourse to intellection it seems to make Revelation redundant and even superfluous, which in theological language is called "submitting Revelation to the judgement of reason"; this confusion - which is not disinterested - between reason and intellection is altogether typical. Plato’s anticipated retort is the following, and it is all the more justified in that religious sentimentalism has had extremely serious, if providential, consequences since "it must needs be that offenses come": "All force of reasoning must be enlisted to oppose anyone who tries to maintain an assertion and at the same time destroys knowledge, understanding and intelligence." (Sophist, 249). sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

From the point of view of the Platonists - in the widest sense - the return to God is inherent in the fact of existence: our being itself offers the way of return, for that being is divine in its nature, otherwise it would be nothing; that is why we must return, passing through the strata of our ontological reality, all the way to pure Substance, which is one; it is thus that we become perfectly "ourselves". Man realizes what he knows: a full comprehension - in the light of the Absolute - of relativity dissolves it and leads back to the Absolute. Here again there is no irreducible antagonism between Greeks and Christians: if the intervention of Christ can become necessary, it is not because deliverance is something other than a return, through the strata of our own being, to our true Self, but because the function of Christ is to render such a return possible. It is made possible on two planes, the one existential and exoteric and the other intellectual and esoteric; the second plane is hidden in the first, which alone appears in the full light of day, and that is the reason why for the common run of mortals the Christian perspective is only existential and separative, not intellectual and unitive. This gives rise to another misunderstanding between Christians and Platonists: while the Platonists propound liberation by Knowledge because man is an intelligence [NA: Islam, in conformity with its " paracletic" charact er, reflects this point of view - which is also that of the Vedanta and of all other forms of gnosis - in a Semitic and religious mode, and realizes it all the more readily in its esoterism; like the Hellenist, the Moslem asks first of all: "What must I know or admit, seeing that I have an intelligence capable of objectivity and of totality?" and not a priori "What must I want, since I have a will that is free, but fallen?"] the Christians envisage in their over-all doctrine a salvation by Grace because man is an existence - as such separated from God - and a fallen and impotent will. Once again, the Greeks can be reproached for having at their command but a single way, inaccessible in fact to the majority, and for giving the impression that it is philosophy that saves, just as one can reproach the Christians for ignoring liberation by Knowledge and for assigning an absolute character to our existential and volitive reality alone and to means appropriate to that aspect of our being, or for taking into consideration our existential relativity and not our "intellectual absoluteness"; nevertheless the reproach to the Greeks cannot concern their sages, any more than the reproach to the Christians can attack their gnosis, nor in a general way their sanctity. sophiaperennis: Platonism   and Christianity

Far from proving that modern man "keeps a cool head" and that men of old were dreamers, modern unbelief and "exact science" are to be explained at bottom by a wave of rationalism - sometimes apparently antirationalist - which is reacting against the religious sentimentalism and bourgeois romanticism of the previous epoch; both these tendencies have existed side by side since the "age of reason." sophiaperennis: Philosophy and modern times

... the "intellectual worldliness" inaugurated by the Renaissance and by Descartes   resulted in a weakening of contemplative intelligence and religious instinct... sophiaperennis: Descartes and the Cogito

At all events, the "sensible consolation" is in the work before being in the result; the sanctification of the religious artist precedes that of the spectator. Every legitimate art satisfies both emotivity and intelligence, not only in the finished work, but also in its production. There is likewise in art a desire to pin down the visual, auditive or other forms which escape us, and which we wish to retain or possess; to this desire for fixation or possession there is added quite naturally a desire for assimilation, for a quality must not only be beautiful, it must also be entirely ours, which brings us back directly or indirectly, depending on the case, to the theme of union and love. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

The religious naturism of the Redskins, envisaged here in connection with its exclusion of the plastic arts, results from a real and thus legitimate aspect of things, it could thus not fail to be affirmed in one or several parts of the globe; history proves that this perspective, while it obviously has nothing exclusive about it nevertheless has a solid basis; to understand this, it is enough to think of all the deviations of the "creative genius" and of all the evils from which the world of civilizationism suffers. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

St Louis, or any other Christian prince of his time, could figure amongst the kings and queens - in the form of columns - of the cathedral of Chartres; the later kings - those more marked by an invading worldliness - would be unthinkable as sacred statues. [NA: The column statues of Chartres have, like an iconostasis, the value of a criterion of formal orthodoxy: no exhibition of individualism or of profanity could find a place amongst them.] Not that all the princes of the Middle Ages were individually better than those of the Renaissance and later ages, but this is not the question; it is a question exclusively of demeanour and dress in so far as these are adequate manifestations of a norm that is both religious and ethnic, and thus of an ideal which allies the divine with the human. The king, like the pontiff, is not merely an official, he is also, by reason of his central position, an object of contemplation, in the sense of the Sanskrit term darshan: to benefit from the darshan of a saint is to be penetrated by his appearance in all its unassessable aspects if not also by the symbolism of his pontifical robes, as the case may be. St Louis is one of those sovereigns who spiritually incarnate the ideal which they represent so to speak liturgically, whereas the majority of the other medieval princes represent this ideal at least in the second way which, let it be said once more, is far from being without importance from the point of view of the concrete intelligibility of the royal function, whose undertones are both earthly and heavenly. 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

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

Sensible forms therefore correspond with exactness to intellections, and it is for this reason that traditional art has rules which apply the cosmic laws and universal principles to the domain of forms, and which, beneath their more general outward aspect, reveal the ’style’ of the civilization under consideration, this ’style’ in its turn rendering explicit the form of intellectuality of that civilization. When art ceases to be traditional and becomes human, individual, and therefore arbitrary, that is infallibly the sign - and secondarily the cause - of an intellectual decline, a weakening, which, in the sight of those who know how to ’discriminate between the spirits’ and who look upon things with an unprejudiced eye, is expressed by the more or less incoherent and spiritually insignificant, we would go even as far as to say unintelligible character of the forms. [NA: We are referring here to the decadence of certain branches of religious art during the Gothic period, especially in its latter part, and to Western art as a whole from the Renaissance onward: Christian art (architecture, sculpture, painting, liturgical goldsmithery, etc.), which formerly was sacred, symbolical, spiritual, had to give way before the invasion of neo-antique and naturalistic, individualistic and sentimental art; this art, which contained absolutely nothing ’miraculous’- no matter what those who believe in the ’Greek miracle’ may care to think - is quite unfitted for the transmission of intellectual intuitions and no longer even answers to collective psychic aspirations; it is thus as far removed as can be from intellectual contemplation and takes into consideration feelings only; on the other hand, feeling lowers itself in proportion as it fulfils the needs of the masses, until it finishes up in a sickly and pathetic vulgarity. It is strange that no one has understood to what a degree this barbarism of forms, which reached a zenith of empty and miserable exhibitionism in the period of Louis XV, contributed - and still contributes - to driving many souls (and by no means the worst) away from the Church; they feel literally choked in surroundings which do not allow their intelligence room to breathe. Let us note in passing that the historical connection between the new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome - of the Renaissance period, therefore anti-spiritual and rhetorical, ’human’ if so preferred - and the origin of the Reformation are unfortunately very far from fortuitous.] sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

We may perhaps be allowed to add a remark here which seems to take us rather outside our subject, though some readers, at least, will understand its appropriat eness: an objection might be raised to what we have just been saying on the grounds that Shri Chaitanya bestowed initiation not only on Hindus but on Moslems as well; this objection, however, is pointless in the present case, for what Shri Chaitanya, who was one of the greatest spiritual Masters of India, transmitted first and foremost, was a current of grace resulting from the intense radiation of his own holiness; this radiation had the virtue of in some degree erasing or drowning formal differences, which is all the more admissible in that he was ’bhaktic’ by nature. Besides, the fact that Shri Chaitanya could accomplish miracles in no wise implies that another guru, even if he were of the same initiatory lineage and therefore a legitimate successor of Chaitanya, could do the same; from another point of view which, though less important, is by no means negligible, one must also take into consideration should never be forgotten is the fact that the absence of the formal element is not equivalent to the presence of the unformed, and vice-versa; the unformed and the barbarous will never attain the majestic beauty of the void, whatever may be believed by those who have an interest in passing off a deficiency for a superiority. [NA: The claim has sometimes been put forward that Christianity, on the ground that it stands above forms, cannot be identified with any particular civilization; it is indeed understandable that some people would like to find consolation for the loss of Christian civilization. including its art, but the opinion we have just quoted is none the less inexcusable. The recent new ecclesiastical canon concerning the laws of sacred art really has only a negative bearing, in the sense that it maintains a minimum of tradition simply in order to avoid seeing forms become so imaginative that the identification of their subjects is no longer possible; in other words, all that can be expected from this Canon is that the faithful may be saved from mistaking a church steeple for a factory-chimney, and viceversa. Apart from that, the aforesaid Canon sanctions all the errors of the past when it declares that religious art must ’speak the language of its period’, without even pausing to put the question of just what ’a period’ means, and what rights it possesses, given that it does possess any; such a principle, in the name of which men have gone as far as to proclaim that ’modern ecclesiastical art is searching for a new style’, implicitly contains another misunderstanding and a fresh repudiation of Christian art.] This law of compensation, by virtue of which certain relationships become gradually inverted during the course of a traditional cycle, can be applied in all spheres: for instance, we may quote the following saying (hadith) of the Prophet Mohammed  : ’In the beginning of Islam, he who omits a tenth of the Law is damned; but in the latter days, he who shall accomplish a tenth thereof will be saved.’ sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

The analogical relationship between intellections and material forms explains how it became possible for esotericism to be grafted on to the exercise of the crafts and especially architectural art; the cathedrals which the Christian initiates left behind them offer the most explicit as well as the most dazzling proof of the spiritual exaltation of the Middle Ages. [NA: When standing before a cathedral, a person really feels he is placed at the Centre of the world; standing before a church of the Renaissance, Baroque or Rococo periods, he merely feels himself to be in Europe.] This brings us to a most important aspect of the question now before us, namely, the action of esotericism on exotericism through the medium of sensible forms, the production of which is precisely the prerogative of craft initiation. Through these forms, which act as vehicles of the integral traditional doctrine, and which thanks to their symbolism translate this doctrine into a language that is both immediate and universal, esotericism infuses an intellectual quality into the properly religious part of the tradition, thereby establishing a balance the absence of which would finally bring about the dissolution of the whole civilization, as has happened in the Christian world. The abandoning of sacred art deprived esotericism of its most direct means of action; the outward tradition insisted more and more on its own peculiarities, that is to say, its limitations, until finally, by want of that current of universality which, through the language of forms, had quickened and stabilized the religious civilization, reactions in a contrary sense were brought about; that is to say, the formal limitations, instead of being compensated and thereby stabilized by means of the supra-formal ’interferences’ of esotericism, gave rise, through their ’opacity’ or ’massiveness’, to negations which might be qualified as ’infra-formal’, resulting as they did from an individual arbitrariness which, far from being a form of the truth, was merely a formless chaos of opinions and fancies. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN 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

But let us return to the errors of naturalism. Art, as soon as it is no longer determined, illuminated and guided by spirituality, lies at the mercy of the individual and purely psychical resources of the artist, and these resources must soon run out, if only because of the very platitude of the naturalistic principle which calls only for a superficial tracing of Nature. Reaching the dead-point of its own platitude, naturalism inevitably engendered the monstrosities of ’surrealism’, The latter is but the decomposing body of an art, and in any case should rather be called ’infra-realism’; it is properly speaking the satanic consequence of naturalistic luciferianism. Naturalism, as a matter of fact, is clearly luciferian in its wish to imitate the creations of God, not to mention its affirmation of the psychical element to the detriment of the spiritual, of the individual to the detriment of the universal, of the bare fact to the detriment of the symbol. Normally, man must imitate the creative act, not the thing created; that is what is done by symbolic art, and the results are ’creations’ which are not would-be duplications of those of God, but rather a reflection of them according to a real analogy, revealing the transcendental aspects of things; and this revelation is the only sufficient reason of art, apart from any practical uses such and such objects may serve. There is here a metaphysical inversion of relation which we have already pointed out: for God, His creature is a reflection or an ’exteriorized’ aspect of Himself; for the artist, on the contrary, the work is a reflection of an inner reality of which he himself is only an outward aspect; God creates His own image, while man, so to speak, fashions his own essence, at least symbolically. On the principial plane, the inner manifests the outer, but on the manifested plane, the outer fashions the inner, and a sufficient reason for all traditional art, no matter of what kind, is the fact that in a certain sense the work is greater than the artist himself and brings back the latter, through the mystery of artistic creation, to the proximity of his own Divine Essence. [NA: This explains the danger, so far as Semitic peoples are concerned, that lies in the painting and especially in the carving of living things. Where the Hindu and the inhabitant of the Far East adores a Divine reality through a symbol - and we know that a symbol is truly what it symbolizes as far as its essential reality is concerned - the Semite will display a tendency to deify the symbol itself; one of the reasons for the prohibition of plastic and pictorial arts amongst the Semitic peoples was certainly a wish to prevent naturalistic deviations, a very real danger among men whose mentality demanded a Tradition religious in form.] sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

In the Middle Ages a religious man could pray in surroundings where everything testified to a homogeneous spirit and to an intelligence supernaturally inspired, he could also pray before a blank wall. He had a choice between the ever truthful language of precious forms and the silence of rough stones. Happily for him he had no other choice. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

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

The question of knowing which detail it is that impugns the authenticity of a celestial apparition depends either on the nature of things or else on a particular religious perspective. That is to say there are elements which in themselves, and from every religious or spiritual point of view, are incompatible with celestial apparitions ... [To speak of these] discordant elements which are intrinsically incompatible with a celestial manifestation, there are first of all — and quite obviously — elements of ugliness or grotesque features, not only in the actual form of the apparition but also in its movements or even simply in the surroundings of the vision; then there is the question of speech, both from the point of view of content and of style, for Heaven neither lies nor gossips. [NA: Which puts paid to a whole series of apparitions or "messages" of which one hears talk in the second half of the 20th century.] "God is beautiful and He loves beauty", the Prophet said. Loving beauty, He also loves dignity, He who combines beauty (jamal) with majesty (jalal). "God is love", and love, if it does not exclude holy wrath, assuredly excludes ugliness and pettiness. sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism