glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

truths well enough in theory, has nonetheless a disproportionate approach to them, an
approach that is unaccompanied by a sufficient adaptation of the soul; not that such
thought is profane by definition as in the case of ignorant thought, but it is so secondarily
or morally and lies in grave danger of error, for man is not merely a mirror, he is a
cosmos which is both complex and fragile. [LT, Understanding and Believing]
Time: Time is but a spiroidal movement around a motionless Center. [LAW, Religio
Perennis]
Time (concrete / abstract): Concrete time is the changing of phenomena; abstract time
is the duration which this change renders measurable. [FDH, Structure and Universality
of the Conditions of Existence]
Time (objective / subjective): Objective time is so to speak a spiroidal movement
comprising four phases, and this movement is qualitatively ascending or descending,
according to what the period of the full cycle requires; this is to say that time is like a
wheel that turns, this rotation being itself submitted to a greater rotation, exactly as the
rotation of the earth is inscribed in the rotation of the planet around the sun. As for
subjective time, the definition of which is just as elementary as that of the corresponding
space, it is divided into present, past and future: what we are, what we were and what we
will be, and in addition, what our surroundings are, were and will be. [FDH, Structure
and Universality of the Conditions of Existence]
Tradition / Science: Tradition speaks to each man the language he can understand,
provided he be willing to listen; this reservation is essential, for tradition, we repeat,
cannot become bankrupt; it is rather of man’s bankruptcy that one should speak, for it is
he who has lost the intuition of the supernatural and the sense of the sacred. Man has
allowed himself to be seduced by the discoveries and inventions of an illegitimately
totalitarian science; that is, a science which does not recognize its own limits and for that
reason is unaware of what lies beyond them. Fascinated by scientific phenomena as well
as by the erroneous conclusions he draws from them, man has ended up being submerged
by his own creations; he is not ready to realize that a traditional message is situated on an
altogether different level, and how much more real this level is. Men let themselves be
dazzled all the more easily since scientism gives them all the excuses they want to justify
their attachment to the world of appearances and thus also their flight before the presence
of the Absolute in any form. [PM, No Initiative without Truth]
Traditional: That is “traditional” which is transmitted from a divine source. [FDH, The
Sense of the Sacred]
Traditionalism: “Traditionalism”, like “esoterism,” . . . has nothing pejorative about it in
itself and one might even say that it is less open to argument and a far broader term, in
any case, than the latter; in fact, however, with a particularly reprehensible arbitrariness it
has been associated with an idea which inevitably devalues its meaning, namely the idea
of “nostalgia for the past”; it is hardly credible that such an idiotic and dishonest
circumlocution should be freely resorted to as an argument against strictly doctrinal
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