glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

central state, is as it were surrounded by a ring of fire: in it there is only one choice, either
to escape from the current of forms upwards, towards God, or else to leave the human
state downwards through the fire, the fire which is like the sanction of the betrayal on the
part of those who have not realized the divine meaning of the human condition. If “the
human state is difficult to obtain,” as is held by Asiatic believers in transmigration, it is –
by reason of its centrality and theomorphic majesty – equally hard to leave. Men go to the
fire because they are gods and they come out of the fire because they are but creatures:
God alone could go to hell eternally – if He could sin. Or again: the human state is very
near to the divine Sun, if we can at all speak of proximity in such a connection; the fire is
the possible ransom – in reverse – of that privileged situation, how privileged can be
gauged by the intensity and inextinguishability of the fire. From the gravity of hell we
must infer the grandeur of man, and not conversely infer from the seeming innocence of
man the supposed injustice of hell. [UI, The Quran]
Five Divine Presences: In Sufi terminology they are: the “human realm” (nasut), that is,
the domain of the corporeal, since man is created out of “earth”; then the “realm of
royalty” (malakut), so called because it immediately dominates the corporeal world; next
comes the “realm of power” (jabarut), which, macrocosmically, is Heaven and,
microcosmically, the created or human intellect, that “supernaturally natural” Paradise
which we carry within us. The fourth degree is the “Realm of the Divine’ (Lahut), which
is Being and which coincides with the uncreated Intellect, the Logos; the final degree – if
provisional use can be made of such a term – is none other than “Quiddity” or “Aseity”
or “Ipseity” (Hahut, from Huwa, “He”), in other words, the Infinite Self. [FSR, The Five
Divine Presences]
Form: Form is the manifestation of an “idea,” hence of a particular possibility or of an
archetype, and in the final analysis of an aspect of the divine nature, and this to the extent
that the form is positive and essential, not privative and accidental. [FDH, Structure and
Universality of the Conditions of Existence]
Form is by definition the manifestation of an archetype, the intention of which excludes
an indefinite gradation. In other words, form coincides with an “idea” which cannot be
something other than what it is. [FDH, The Message of the Human Body]
Form reflects the first hypostatic autodetermination, the divine Logos. [FDH, Structure
and Universality of the Conditions of Existence]
Every expressed truth necessarily assumes a form, that of its expression, and it is
metaphysically impossible that any form should possess a unique value to the exclusion
of other forms; for a form, by definition, cannot be unique and exclusive, that is to say, it
cannot be the only possible expression of what it expresses. Form implies specification or
distinction, and the specific is only conceivable as a modality of a “species,” that is to
say, of a category that includes a combination of analogous modalities. Again, that which
is limited excludes by definition whatever is not comprised within its own limits and
must compensate for this exclusion by a reaffirmation or repetition of itself outside its
own boundaries, which amounts to saying that the existence of other limited things is
rigorously implied in the very definition of the limited. To claim that a limitation, for
example, a form considered as such, is unique and incomparable of its kind, and that it
excludes the existence of other analogous modalities, is to attribute to it the unicity of
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