glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

likewise the Cure d’Ars: “Humility is to the virtues what the string is to the rosary;
remove the string and all the beads scatter; remove humility and all the virtues
disappear.” In other words, pride consists in glorying in one’s virtues, either before others
or before oneself. And this destroys the virtues for two reasons: first of all because one
takes them away from God, to whom they belong in reality, thus putting oneself – like
Lucifer – in place of the Divine Source; and secondly because one attributes de facto a
disproportionate value to a phenomenon which is necessarily relative. “When thou givest
alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” [SME, Anonymity of the
Virtues]
Primordiality: Primordiality is the fitrah of the Sufis: it is essential and normative
human nature, created in the image of the Creator; and for that very reason it is
intelligence as such, projection of the Divine Consciousness. For “I was a hidden treasure
and wished to be known, hence I created the world”; and with it the human spirit. [RHC,
On Intelligence]
Profound / Inferior Person: A noble and profound person tends to see the Substance in
the accidents, whereas an inferior person tends to reduce the substantial manifestations to
a trivializing accidentality. The sense of the sacred and of the celestial is the measure of
human worth.*
(* Which cuts short the hasty and barbarous distinction between the “savage” and the
“civilized.”) [PM, The Liberating Passage]
Progress: All too often things which some people call “useful” are anything but useful in
their results. “Progress” is healing a paralytic while depriving him of his sight. [LT,
Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty]
“Progress” is most often but a transference, the exchange of one evil for another,
otherwise our age would be perfect and sanctified. In the world of man, as it is in itself, it
is scarcely possible to choose a good; one is always reduced to the choice of a lesser evil,
and in order to determine which evil is the less, there is no alternative but to relate the
question to a hierarchy of values derived from eternal realities, and that is exactly what
“our age” never does. [LAW, The Universality of Monasticism]
Proof: All proof is relative by definition, since an absolute proof would be identical with
the thing to be proved; a proof is always more or less separated from its object. There is
something of its object, however, in the proof, and this something compels faith; in every
manifestation of liberating truth there is an evidence to which we may or may not be
sensitive, but which we grasp to the extent that our spirit recognizes in it some latent
content of its own substance. The proof of the truth of the Invisible is the recollection
which the expression of that truth actualizes in spirits that have remained true to their
original vocation; the illuminative function devolves upon metaphysical argument, and
also on symbols and miracles if account be taken of all the modes and imponderable
factors of the intelligence or of the soul. To communicate Intellection to the receptive
spirit is to remind it of what it is and at the same time of that Being through which it
exists. [LT, Abuse of the Ideas of the Concrete and the Abstract]
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