Post by giovanni on Nov 13, 2005 17:12:36 GMT
The following excerpt is taken from the beginning of the first chapter of
Esotericism As Principle and As Way by Frithjof Schuon
Understanding Esotericism
The prerogative of the human state is objectivity, the essential content of which is the Absolute. There is no knowledge without objectivity of the intelligence; there is no freedom without objectivity of the will; and there is no nobility without objectivity of the soul. In each of these three domains, it is a question of both a horizontal and a vertical objectivity; the subject, be it intellective, volitive or affective, necessarily has in view both the contingent and the Absolute: the contingent, because the subject is itself contingent and to the extent that it is so, and the Absolute, because the subject partakes of the Absolute through its capacity for objectivity.
Esotericism, by its interpretations, its revelations and its interiorising and essentializing operations, tends to realize pure and direct objectivity; this is the reason for its existence. Objectivity takes account of both immanence and transcendence; it is both extinction and reintegration. It is not other than the Truth, in which subject and object coincide, and in which the essential takes precedence over the accidental — or in which the principle takes precedence over its manifestation — either by extinguishing it, or by reintegrating it, depending on the various aspects of relativity itself.(1)
To say objectivity is to say totality, and this on all levels: esoteric doctrines realize totality to the same extent that they realize objectivity; what distinguishes the teaching of a Shankara from that of a Ramanuja is precisely totality. On the one hand, partial or indirect truth can save, and in this respect it can suffice us; on the other hand, if God has judged it good to give us an understanding which transcends the necessary minimum, we can do nothing about this and we would be highly ungracious to complain about it. Man certainly is free to close his eyes to particular data — and he may do so either from ignorance or as a matter of convenience, — but at least nothing forces him to do so.
All the same, the difference between the two perspectives in question lies not only in the manner of envisaging a particular object, but also in the objects envisaged; that is to say one does not only speak differently about the same thing, one also speaks of different things, which indeed is perfectly obvious.
Nevertheless, if on the one hand the world of gnosis and that of belief are distinct, on the other hand and in another respect they meet and interpenetrate each other. We may be told that one or other of the points we make has nothing specifically esoteric or gnostic about it; we would readily agree and are the first to recognize it. The two perspectives in question may or must coincide at many points, and at different levels, for the obvious reason that the underlying truth is one, and also because man is one.
In knowledge, it is necessary to distinguish the relationship of analogy from the relationship of identity, for this is what fundamentally differentiates rational thought from intellectual inspiration in the proper and rigorous meaning of the latter adjective. The relationship of analogy is that of discontinuity between centre and periphery: created things, including thoughts — everything indeed that constitutes cosmic manifestation — are separated from the Principle; the transcendent realities grasped by thought are separate from the thinking subject. In other words rational or mental knowledge is like a reflection separated from its luminous source, a reflection moreover that is exposed to all kinds of subjective perturbations.
The relationship of identity on the contrary is that of continuity between centre and periphery, it is consequently distinguished from the relationship of analogy as radii are distinguished from concentric circles. Divine manifestation, around us and in us, prolongs and projects the Principle and is identified with it precisely in respect of the immanent divine quality; the sun is really the Principle perceived through existential veils; water is really universal Passivity perceived through the same veils. As far as knowledge is concerned, it is not enough that this relationship should simply be thought of in order to confer on reasoning a character of divinity, and thus of truth and infallibility; it is true that objectively every thought manifests — in the metaphysical relationship of identity — the Divine Thinker, if one may express oneself thus, but this purely objective and existential — or ontological — situation is completely general and remains independent of qualitative differences, inasmuch as it has nothing to do with the subjective and cognitive realization of the relationship of identity. We have said that in rational or mental knowledge, the transcendent realities grasped by thought are separated from the thinking subject; in properly intellectual or heart knowledge, the principial realities grasped by the heart are themselves prolonged in intellection; heart knowledge is one with what it knows, it is like an uninterrupted ray of light.
Kantians will ask us to prove the existence of this way of knowing; 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)
But let us return to the distinction between indirect, rational and mental knowledge and direct, intellectual and heart knowledge; apart from these two modes there is a third, and this is the knowledge of faith. Faith amounts to an objectivized heart knowledge; what the microcosmic heart does not tell us, the macrocosmic heart — the Logos — tells us in a symbolic and partial language, and this for two reasons: to inform us concerning that of which our soul is urgently in need, and to awaken in us as far as possible the remembrance of innate truths.
If there is an intrinsically direct knowledge, which nevertheless is extrinsically objectivized as to its communication, there must correlatively be a knowledge which in itself is indirect, but which nevertheless is subjective as to its operation, and this is the discernment of objective things from the starting point of their subjective equivalents, given that reality is one; for there is nothing in the macrocosm that does not derive from the metacosm and which is not to be found again in the microcosm.
Direct and inward knowledge, that of the Heart-Intellect, is what the Greeks called gnosis; the word “esotericism” — according to its etymology — signifies gnosis inasmuch as it de facto underlies the religious, and thus dogmatic doctrines.
On the exoterist side, the argument is advanced against universalist esotericism that Revelation said such and such a thing and consequently this must be accepted in an unconditional manner; on the esoterist side, it will be said that Revelation is intrinsically absolute and extrinsically relative and that this relativity derives from a combination of two factors, namely intellection and experience. For example, the axiom that a form cannot be absolutely unique of its kind — any more than the sun, though intrinsically representing the unique centre, cannot exclude the existence of other fixed stars — is an axiom of intellection, but a priori has only an abstract import; it becomes concrete, however, through the experience which, should the occasion arise, puts us intimately into relationship with other solar systems of the religious cosmos, and which precisely compels us to distinguish, within Revelation, between an absolute and intrinsic sense and a relative and extrinsic sense. According to the first sense, Christ is unique, and he told us so; according to the second sense, he said this as Logos, and the Logos, which is unique, comprises in fact other possible manifestations.
It is true that experience alone, in the absence of pure intellection, can give rise to completely opposite conclusions: one might well believe that the plurality of the religions proved their falseness or at least their subjectiveness, since they differ. Most paradoxically, but fatally — civilizationism having prepared the ground — the official stratum of Catholic thought has let itself be carried away by the conclusions of profane experience by voluntarily ignoring those of intellection;(3) this leads these ideologists into accepting certain extrinsic postulates of esotericism — in particular that of the validity of the other religions — but at the cost of ruining their own religion and without understanding in depth that of the others.(4)
The esoterist sees things, not as they appear according to a certain perspective, but as they are: he takes account of what is essential and consequently invariable under the veil of different religious formulations, while necessarily taking his own starting point in a given formulation. This at least is the position in principle and the justification for esotericism; in fact it is far from always being consistent with itself, inasmuch as intermediary solutions are humanly inevitable.
Everything which, in metaphysics or in spirituality, is universally true, becomes “esoteric” in so far as it does not agree, or does not seem to agree, with a given formalistic system or “exoterism”; yet every truth is present by right in every religion, given that every religion is made of truth. This amounts to saying that esotericism is possible and even necessary; the whole question is to know at what level and in what context it is manifested, for relative and limited truth has its rights, as does the total truth; it has these rights in the context assigned to it by the nature of things, which is that of psychological and moral opportuneness and of traditional equilibrium.
The paradox of esotericism is that on the one hand “men do not light a candle and put it under a bushel”, while on the other hand “give not what is sacred to dogs”; between these two expressions lies the “light that shineth in the darkness, but the darkness comprehended it not”. There are fluctuations here which no one can prevent and which are the ransom of contingency.
Exoterism is a precarious thing by reason of its limits or its exclusions; there arrives a moment in history when all kinds of experiences oblige it to modify its claims to exclusiveness, and it is then driven to a choice: escape from these limitations by the upward path, in esotericism, or by the downward path, in a worldly and suicidal liberalism. As one might have expected, the civilizationist exoterism of the West has chosen the downward path, while combining this incidentally with a few esoteric notions which in such conditions remain inoperative.
Fallen man, and thus the average man, is as it were poisoned by the passional element, either grossly or subtly; from this results an obscuring of the Intellect and the necessity of a Revelation coming from the outside. Remove the passional element from the soul and the intelligence — remove “the rust from the mirror” or “from the heart” — and the Intellect will be released; it will reveal from within what religion reveals from without.(5) This brings us to an important point: in order to make itself understood by souls impregnated with passion, religion must itself adopt a so to speak passional language, whence dogmatism, which excludes, and moralism, which schematizes; if the average man or collective man were not passional, Revelation would speak the language of the Intellect and there would be no exoterism, nor for that matter esotericism considered as an occult complement. There are here three possibilities: firstly, men dominate the passional element, everyone lives spiritually by his inward Revelation; this is the golden age, in which everyone is born an initiate. Second possibility: men are affected by the passional element to the point of forgetting certain aspects of the Truth, whence the necessity — or the opportuneness — of Revelations that while being outward are metaphysical in spirit, such as the Upanishads.(6) Thirdly: the majority of men are dominated by passions, whence the formalistic, exclusive and combative religions, which on the one hand communicate to them the means of channelling the passional element with a view to salvation, and on the other hand the means of overcoming it in view of the total Truth, and of thereby transcending the religious formalism which veils it while suggesting it in an indirect manner. Religious revelation is both a veil of light and a light veiled.
Notes
1. It results from all this that by “objectivity” must be understood not a knowledge that is limited to a purely empirical recording of data received from outside, but a perfect adequation of the knowing subject to the known object, which indeed is in keeping with the current meaning of the term. An intelligence or a knowledge is “objective” when it is capable of grasping the object as it is and not as it may be deformed by the subject.
2. Kant calls “transcendental subreption” (Erschleichung) the transformation” of the purely “regulative” idea of God into an objective reality; which once more proves that he is unable to conceive certitude outside a reasoning founded on sense experience and operating beneath the reality which he pretends to judge and deny. In short, Kantian “criticism’ consists in calling liar” whoever does not bend to its discipline; agnostics do practically the same, by decreeing that no one can know anything, since they themselves know nothing, or desire to know nothing.
3. Persistence in their errors is made easy for the modernists by the extreme, and largely arbitrary, positions of some traditionalists, who compromise tradition by making it responsible for a civilizationist and nationalist ideology, which is all too readily defamatory where gnosis or the Orient is concerned; which can give comfort only to their adversaries and which has no connection with the Holy Spirit to say the least.
4. The modernists think they were the first to know how to combine extrinsic relativity with intrinsic absoluteness, but their demarcation line between the extrinsic and the intrinsic is completely false, precisely owing to the fact that they immediately reduce the inward to the outward or the absolute to the relative. Every question of civilizationism aside, it is necessary to state clearly here that modernism cannot derive from Catholicism in itself but on the contrary has taken possession of it and makes use of it like an occupying power. The law of gravity does the rest.
5. This release is strictly impossible — we must insist upon it — without the co-operation of a religion, an orthodoxy, a traditional esotericism with all that this implies.
6. Such a Revelation has a function that is both conservative and preventive, it expresses the Truth in view of the risk of its being forgotten; it consequently also has the aim of protecting the “pure” from contamination by the “impure”, of recalling the Truth to those who run the risk of going astray by carelessness.
Esotericism As Principle and As Way by Frithjof Schuon
Understanding Esotericism
The prerogative of the human state is objectivity, the essential content of which is the Absolute. There is no knowledge without objectivity of the intelligence; there is no freedom without objectivity of the will; and there is no nobility without objectivity of the soul. In each of these three domains, it is a question of both a horizontal and a vertical objectivity; the subject, be it intellective, volitive or affective, necessarily has in view both the contingent and the Absolute: the contingent, because the subject is itself contingent and to the extent that it is so, and the Absolute, because the subject partakes of the Absolute through its capacity for objectivity.
Esotericism, by its interpretations, its revelations and its interiorising and essentializing operations, tends to realize pure and direct objectivity; this is the reason for its existence. Objectivity takes account of both immanence and transcendence; it is both extinction and reintegration. It is not other than the Truth, in which subject and object coincide, and in which the essential takes precedence over the accidental — or in which the principle takes precedence over its manifestation — either by extinguishing it, or by reintegrating it, depending on the various aspects of relativity itself.(1)
To say objectivity is to say totality, and this on all levels: esoteric doctrines realize totality to the same extent that they realize objectivity; what distinguishes the teaching of a Shankara from that of a Ramanuja is precisely totality. On the one hand, partial or indirect truth can save, and in this respect it can suffice us; on the other hand, if God has judged it good to give us an understanding which transcends the necessary minimum, we can do nothing about this and we would be highly ungracious to complain about it. Man certainly is free to close his eyes to particular data — and he may do so either from ignorance or as a matter of convenience, — but at least nothing forces him to do so.
All the same, the difference between the two perspectives in question lies not only in the manner of envisaging a particular object, but also in the objects envisaged; that is to say one does not only speak differently about the same thing, one also speaks of different things, which indeed is perfectly obvious.
Nevertheless, if on the one hand the world of gnosis and that of belief are distinct, on the other hand and in another respect they meet and interpenetrate each other. We may be told that one or other of the points we make has nothing specifically esoteric or gnostic about it; we would readily agree and are the first to recognize it. The two perspectives in question may or must coincide at many points, and at different levels, for the obvious reason that the underlying truth is one, and also because man is one.
* * *
In knowledge, it is necessary to distinguish the relationship of analogy from the relationship of identity, for this is what fundamentally differentiates rational thought from intellectual inspiration in the proper and rigorous meaning of the latter adjective. The relationship of analogy is that of discontinuity between centre and periphery: created things, including thoughts — everything indeed that constitutes cosmic manifestation — are separated from the Principle; the transcendent realities grasped by thought are separate from the thinking subject. In other words rational or mental knowledge is like a reflection separated from its luminous source, a reflection moreover that is exposed to all kinds of subjective perturbations.
The relationship of identity on the contrary is that of continuity between centre and periphery, it is consequently distinguished from the relationship of analogy as radii are distinguished from concentric circles. Divine manifestation, around us and in us, prolongs and projects the Principle and is identified with it precisely in respect of the immanent divine quality; the sun is really the Principle perceived through existential veils; water is really universal Passivity perceived through the same veils. As far as knowledge is concerned, it is not enough that this relationship should simply be thought of in order to confer on reasoning a character of divinity, and thus of truth and infallibility; it is true that objectively every thought manifests — in the metaphysical relationship of identity — the Divine Thinker, if one may express oneself thus, but this purely objective and existential — or ontological — situation is completely general and remains independent of qualitative differences, inasmuch as it has nothing to do with the subjective and cognitive realization of the relationship of identity. We have said that in rational or mental knowledge, the transcendent realities grasped by thought are separated from the thinking subject; in properly intellectual or heart knowledge, the principial realities grasped by the heart are themselves prolonged in intellection; heart knowledge is one with what it knows, it is like an uninterrupted ray of light.
Kantians will ask us to prove the existence of this way of knowing; 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)
But let us return to the distinction between indirect, rational and mental knowledge and direct, intellectual and heart knowledge; apart from these two modes there is a third, and this is the knowledge of faith. Faith amounts to an objectivized heart knowledge; what the microcosmic heart does not tell us, the macrocosmic heart — the Logos — tells us in a symbolic and partial language, and this for two reasons: to inform us concerning that of which our soul is urgently in need, and to awaken in us as far as possible the remembrance of innate truths.
If there is an intrinsically direct knowledge, which nevertheless is extrinsically objectivized as to its communication, there must correlatively be a knowledge which in itself is indirect, but which nevertheless is subjective as to its operation, and this is the discernment of objective things from the starting point of their subjective equivalents, given that reality is one; for there is nothing in the macrocosm that does not derive from the metacosm and which is not to be found again in the microcosm.
Direct and inward knowledge, that of the Heart-Intellect, is what the Greeks called gnosis; the word “esotericism” — according to its etymology — signifies gnosis inasmuch as it de facto underlies the religious, and thus dogmatic doctrines.
On the exoterist side, the argument is advanced against universalist esotericism that Revelation said such and such a thing and consequently this must be accepted in an unconditional manner; on the esoterist side, it will be said that Revelation is intrinsically absolute and extrinsically relative and that this relativity derives from a combination of two factors, namely intellection and experience. For example, the axiom that a form cannot be absolutely unique of its kind — any more than the sun, though intrinsically representing the unique centre, cannot exclude the existence of other fixed stars — is an axiom of intellection, but a priori has only an abstract import; it becomes concrete, however, through the experience which, should the occasion arise, puts us intimately into relationship with other solar systems of the religious cosmos, and which precisely compels us to distinguish, within Revelation, between an absolute and intrinsic sense and a relative and extrinsic sense. According to the first sense, Christ is unique, and he told us so; according to the second sense, he said this as Logos, and the Logos, which is unique, comprises in fact other possible manifestations.
It is true that experience alone, in the absence of pure intellection, can give rise to completely opposite conclusions: one might well believe that the plurality of the religions proved their falseness or at least their subjectiveness, since they differ. Most paradoxically, but fatally — civilizationism having prepared the ground — the official stratum of Catholic thought has let itself be carried away by the conclusions of profane experience by voluntarily ignoring those of intellection;(3) this leads these ideologists into accepting certain extrinsic postulates of esotericism — in particular that of the validity of the other religions — but at the cost of ruining their own religion and without understanding in depth that of the others.(4)
The esoterist sees things, not as they appear according to a certain perspective, but as they are: he takes account of what is essential and consequently invariable under the veil of different religious formulations, while necessarily taking his own starting point in a given formulation. This at least is the position in principle and the justification for esotericism; in fact it is far from always being consistent with itself, inasmuch as intermediary solutions are humanly inevitable.
Everything which, in metaphysics or in spirituality, is universally true, becomes “esoteric” in so far as it does not agree, or does not seem to agree, with a given formalistic system or “exoterism”; yet every truth is present by right in every religion, given that every religion is made of truth. This amounts to saying that esotericism is possible and even necessary; the whole question is to know at what level and in what context it is manifested, for relative and limited truth has its rights, as does the total truth; it has these rights in the context assigned to it by the nature of things, which is that of psychological and moral opportuneness and of traditional equilibrium.
The paradox of esotericism is that on the one hand “men do not light a candle and put it under a bushel”, while on the other hand “give not what is sacred to dogs”; between these two expressions lies the “light that shineth in the darkness, but the darkness comprehended it not”. There are fluctuations here which no one can prevent and which are the ransom of contingency.
Exoterism is a precarious thing by reason of its limits or its exclusions; there arrives a moment in history when all kinds of experiences oblige it to modify its claims to exclusiveness, and it is then driven to a choice: escape from these limitations by the upward path, in esotericism, or by the downward path, in a worldly and suicidal liberalism. As one might have expected, the civilizationist exoterism of the West has chosen the downward path, while combining this incidentally with a few esoteric notions which in such conditions remain inoperative.
Fallen man, and thus the average man, is as it were poisoned by the passional element, either grossly or subtly; from this results an obscuring of the Intellect and the necessity of a Revelation coming from the outside. Remove the passional element from the soul and the intelligence — remove “the rust from the mirror” or “from the heart” — and the Intellect will be released; it will reveal from within what religion reveals from without.(5) This brings us to an important point: in order to make itself understood by souls impregnated with passion, religion must itself adopt a so to speak passional language, whence dogmatism, which excludes, and moralism, which schematizes; if the average man or collective man were not passional, Revelation would speak the language of the Intellect and there would be no exoterism, nor for that matter esotericism considered as an occult complement. There are here three possibilities: firstly, men dominate the passional element, everyone lives spiritually by his inward Revelation; this is the golden age, in which everyone is born an initiate. Second possibility: men are affected by the passional element to the point of forgetting certain aspects of the Truth, whence the necessity — or the opportuneness — of Revelations that while being outward are metaphysical in spirit, such as the Upanishads.(6) Thirdly: the majority of men are dominated by passions, whence the formalistic, exclusive and combative religions, which on the one hand communicate to them the means of channelling the passional element with a view to salvation, and on the other hand the means of overcoming it in view of the total Truth, and of thereby transcending the religious formalism which veils it while suggesting it in an indirect manner. Religious revelation is both a veil of light and a light veiled.
Notes
1. It results from all this that by “objectivity” must be understood not a knowledge that is limited to a purely empirical recording of data received from outside, but a perfect adequation of the knowing subject to the known object, which indeed is in keeping with the current meaning of the term. An intelligence or a knowledge is “objective” when it is capable of grasping the object as it is and not as it may be deformed by the subject.
2. Kant calls “transcendental subreption” (Erschleichung) the transformation” of the purely “regulative” idea of God into an objective reality; which once more proves that he is unable to conceive certitude outside a reasoning founded on sense experience and operating beneath the reality which he pretends to judge and deny. In short, Kantian “criticism’ consists in calling liar” whoever does not bend to its discipline; agnostics do practically the same, by decreeing that no one can know anything, since they themselves know nothing, or desire to know nothing.
3. Persistence in their errors is made easy for the modernists by the extreme, and largely arbitrary, positions of some traditionalists, who compromise tradition by making it responsible for a civilizationist and nationalist ideology, which is all too readily defamatory where gnosis or the Orient is concerned; which can give comfort only to their adversaries and which has no connection with the Holy Spirit to say the least.
4. The modernists think they were the first to know how to combine extrinsic relativity with intrinsic absoluteness, but their demarcation line between the extrinsic and the intrinsic is completely false, precisely owing to the fact that they immediately reduce the inward to the outward or the absolute to the relative. Every question of civilizationism aside, it is necessary to state clearly here that modernism cannot derive from Catholicism in itself but on the contrary has taken possession of it and makes use of it like an occupying power. The law of gravity does the rest.
5. This release is strictly impossible — we must insist upon it — without the co-operation of a religion, an orthodoxy, a traditional esotericism with all that this implies.
6. Such a Revelation has a function that is both conservative and preventive, it expresses the Truth in view of the risk of its being forgotten; it consequently also has the aim of protecting the “pure” from contamination by the “impure”, of recalling the Truth to those who run the risk of going astray by carelessness.