glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

use of the intelligence, and not only of the will and the feelings. The totality of truth
demands the totality of man. [SVQ, Human Premises of a Religious Dilemma]
Esoterism / Apostasy: Esoterism, which brings limitations back to their unlimited
archetypes, and apostasy, which rids itself of them in favor of nothingness. [CI, The Idea
of “The Best” in Religions]
Esoterism / Ascesis: The apparently problematical – but in reality elliptical – equation
“esoterism equals ascesis” means in substance: esoterism is the elimination of the
individual obstacles which prevent or “veil” the irradiation of the divine Self in the soul .
. . the removal of an obstacle in view of the “unveiling” of the one Reality. [SME,
Enigma and Message of Islamic Esoterism]
Esoterism / Gnosis: Direct and inward knowledge, that of the Heart-Intellect, is what the
Greeks called gnosis; the word “esoterism” – according to its etymology – signifies
gnosis inasmuch as it de facto underlies the religious, and thus dogmatic doctrines.
[EPW, Understanding Esoterism]
Eternity: One conceives of Eternity according to the proper sense of the word, as being
what is beyond duration and therefore having neither beginning nor end. [IFA,
Concerning the Notion of Eternity]
Ether: The universal “ether,” of which the physical element is only a distant and grosser
reflection, is none other than the divine Word which is everywhere “being” and
“consciousness” and everywhere creative and liberating or revealing and illuminating.
[UI, The Quran]
Evil: From the spiritual point of view, which alone takes account of the true cause of our
calamities, evil is not by definition what causes us to suffer, it is that which – even when
accompanied by a maximum of comfort or of ease, or of “justice” so-called – thwarts a
maximum of souls as regards their final end. [TM, The Impossible Convergence]
Manifestation is not the Principle, the effect is not the cause; that which is “other than
God” could not possess the perfections of God, hence in the final analysis and within the
general imperfection of the created, there results that privative and subversive
phenomenon which we call evil. This is to say that the cosmogonic ray, by plunging as it
were into “nothingness,” ends by manifesting “the possibility of the impossible”; the
“absurd” cannot but be produced somewhere in the economy of the divine Possibility,
otherwise the Infinite would not be the Infinite. But strictly speaking, evil or the devil
cannot oppose the Divinity, who has no opposite; it opposes man who is the mirror of
God and the movement towards the divine. [PM, Man in the Cosmogonic Projection]
With the intention of resolving the problem of evil, some have maintained that evil does
not exist for God, and consequently that for Him everything is a good, which is
inadmissible and ill-sounding. What ought to be said is that God sees the privative
manifestations only in connection with the positive manifestations that compensate for
them; thus evil is a provisional factor in view of a greater good, of a “victory of the
Truth”; vincit omnia Veritas. [PM, Ex Nihilo, In Deo]
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