glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

Christianity: “God became man that man might become God” {St. Irenaeus} [RHC,
Outline of the Christian Message]
Civilization: When people talk about “civilization” they generally attribute a qualitative
meaning to the term; now civilization only represents a value provided it is supra-human
in origin and implies for the “civilized” man a sense of the sacred: only peoples who
really have this sense and draw their life from it are truly civilized. If it is objected that
this reservation does not take account of the whole meaning of the term and that it is
possible to conceive of a world that is civilized though having no religion, the answer is
that in this case the civilization is devoid of value, or rather – since there is no legitimate
choice between the sacred and other things – that it is the most fallacious of aberrations.
A sense of the sacred is fundamental for every civilization because fundamental for man;
the sacred – that which is immutable, inviolable and thus infinitely majestic – is in the
very substance of our spirit and of our existence. The world is miserable because men
live beneath themselves; the error of modern man is that he wants to reform the world
without having either the will or the power to reform man, and this flagrant contradiction,
this attempt to make a better world on the basis of a worsened humanity, can only end in
the very abolition of what is human, and consequently in the abolition of happiness too.
Reforming man means binding him again to Heaven, re-establishing the broken link; it
means tearing him away from the reign of the passions, from the cult of matter, quantity
and cunning, and reintegrating him into the world of the spirit and serenity, we would
even say: into the world of sufficient reason. [UI, Islam]
A civilization is integrated and healthy to the extent that it is founded on the “invisible”
or “underlying” religion, the religio perennis; that is to say, to the extent that its
expressions or its forms are transparent to the Formless and are turned towards the
Origin, thus providing a vehicle for the recollection of a lost Paradise, but also, and with
all the more reason, for the presentiment of a timeless Beatitude. For the Origin is at once
within us and before us; time is but a spiroidal movement around a motionless Center.
[LAW, Religio Perennis]
The monk or the hermit, and every contemplative, though he be a king, lives as if in the
antechamber of Heaven; on this very earth and in his carnal body he has attached himself
to Heaven and enclosed himself in a prolongation of those crystallisations of Light that
are the celestial states. That being so one can understand how monks or nuns can see in
the monastic life their “Paradise on earth”; they are at rest in the Divine Will and wait in
this world below for nothing but death, and in so doing they have already passed through
death; they live here below as if in Eternity. The days as they succeed one another do but
repeat always the same day of God; time stops in a single blessed day, and so is joined
once more to the Origin which is also the Center. And it is this Elysian simultaneity that
the ancient worlds have always had in view, at least in principle and in their nostalgia; a
civilization is a “mystical body”, it is, in so far as that is possible, a collective
contemplative. [LAW, The Ancient Worlds in Perspective]
“Civilization”: The modern idea of “civilization” is not without relation, historically
speaking, to the traditional idea of “empire”; but the “order” has become purely human
and wholly profane, as the notion of “progress” proves, since it is the very negation of
any celestial origin; “civilization” is in fact but urban refinement in the framework of a
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