glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

and its ultimate effects cannot but be deadly. In other words, modern science is a
totalitarian rationalism that eliminates both Revelation and Intellect, and at the same time
a totalitarian materialism that ignores the metaphysical relativity – and therewith also the
impermanence – of matter and of the world. It does not know that the supra-sensible,
situated as it is beyond space and time, is the concrete principle of the world, and that it is
consequently also at the origin of that contingent and changeable coagulation we call
“matter”. A science that is called “exact” is in fact an “intelligence without wisdom”, just
as post-scholastic philosophy is inversely a “wisdom without intelligence”. [LAW, Man
in the Universe]
To postulate a science without metaphysic is a flagrant contradiction, for without
metaphysic there can be no standards and no criteria, no intelligence able to penetrate,
contemplate and co-ordinate. [LAW, The Universality of Monasticism]
Modern science, as it plunges dizzily downwards, its speed increasing in geometrical
progression towards an abyss into which it hurtles like a vehicle without brakes, is
another example of that loss of the “spatial” equilibrium characteristic of contemplative
and still stable civilizations. This criticism of modern science – and it is by no means the
first ever to be made – is made not on the grounds that it studies some fragmentary field
within the limits of its competence, but on the grounds that it claims to be in a position to
attain to total knowledge, and that it ventures conclusions in fields accessible only to a
supra-sensible and truly intellective wisdom, the existence of which it refuses on
principle to admit. In other words, the foundations of modern science are false because,
from the “subject” point of view, it replaces Intellect and Revelation by reason and
experiment, as if it were not contradictory to lay claim to totality on an empirical basis;
and its foundations are false too because, from the “object” point of view, it replaces the
universal Substance by matter alone, either by denying the universal Principle or
reducing it to matter or to some kind of pseudo-absolute from which all transcendence
has been eliminated. [LAW, In the Wake of the Fall]
Scientia Sacra: Scientia sacra or philosophia perennis, that universal gnosis which
always has existed and always will exist. [UI, Foreword]
Scientism: Scientism in fact is less interested in the real as such – which necessarily goes
beyond our limitations – than in what is non-contradictory, therefore in what is logical, or
more precisely, in what is empirically logical; thus in what is logical de facto according
to a given experience, and not in what is logical de jure in accordance with the nature of
things . . .
The fundamental contradiction of scientism is to want to explain the real without the help
of that first science which is metaphysics, hence not to know that only the science of the
Absolute gives meaning and discipline to the science of the relative; and not to know at
the same stroke that the science of the relative, when it is deprived of this help, can only
lead to suicide, beginning with that of the intelligence, then with that of the human, and
in the end, with that of humanity. [FDH, To Refuse or To Accept Revelation]
Scripture / Books: Important is the fact that the Scriptures are sacred, not because of
their subject matter and the way in which it is dealt with, but because of their degree of
inspiration, or what amounts to the same, their divine origin; it is this that determines the
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