glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

certainly not their more or less natural incomprehension, nor the defence of their genuine
right, but solely the perfidiousness of the means that they employ that constitutes what
amounts to a “sin against the Holy Ghost”; this perfidiousness proves, moreover, that the
accusations that they find it necessary to formulate, generally serve only as a pretext for
gratifying an instinctive hatred of everything that seems to threaten their superficial
equilibrium, which is really only a form of individualism, therefore of ignorance. [TUR,
The Limitations of Exoterism]
Faith: Faith is like an ‘existential’ intuition of its ‘intellectual’ object. [GDW, The Sense
of the Absolute in Religions]
Faith is to say “yes” to the truth of God and of immortality – this truth which we carry in
the depths of our heart – it is to see concretely what apparently is abstract; it is, to speak
in Islamic terms, to “serve God as if thou sawest Him, and if thou seest Him not, He
nonetheless seeth thee”; and it is also the sense of the goodness of God and trust in His
Mercy. [CI, The Question of Evangelicalism]
Faith is the participation of the will in the intelligence; just as on the physical plane man
adapts his action to the physical facts which determine its nature, so also, on the spiritual
plane, he should act in accordance with his convictions, by inward activity even more
than by outward activity, for “before acting one must first be,” and our being is nothing
else but our inward activity. The soul must be to the intelligence what beauty is to truth,
and this is what we have called the “moral qualification” that should accompany the
“intellectual qualification.” [LT, Understanding and Believing]
Faith is in fact nothing else than the “bhaktic” mode of Knowledge and of intellectual
certainty, which means that Faith is a passive act of the intelligence, its immediate object
being not the truth as such, but a symbol of the truth. This symbol will yield up its secrets
in proportion to the greatness of the Faith, which in its turn will be determined by an
attitude of confidence or of emotional certainty, that is to say, by an element of bhakti, or
Love. Insofar as Faith is a contemplative attitude, its subject is the intelligence; it can
therefore be said to constitute a virtual Knowledge; but since its mode is passive, it must
compensate this passivity by a complementary active attitude, that is to say, by an attitude
of the will the substance of which is precisely confidence and fervor, by virtue of which
the intelligence will receive spiritual certainties. Faith is a priori a natural disposition of
the soul to admit the supernatural; it is therefore essentially an intuition of the
supernatural, brought about by Grace, which is actualized by means of the attitude of
fervent confidence. [TUR, Universality and Particular Nature of the Christian Religion]
Faith is the conformity of the intelligence and the will to revealed truths. This conformity
is either formal alone or else essential, in the sense that the object of faith is a dogmatic
form and, behind this, an essence of Truth. Faith is belief when the volitive element
predominates over the intellectual; it is knowledge or gnosis when the intellectual
element predominates over the volitive. But there are also certitude and fervor, the latter
being volitive and the former intellectual: fervor gives belief its spiritual quality; certitude
is an intrinsic quality of gnosis. The term “faith” could not mean exclusively belief or
fervor, nor exclusively knowledge or certitude; it cannot be said either that belief that it is
all that is possible in the way of faith, or that knowledge is not faith at all. [SW, The
Nature and Arguments of Faith]
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