glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

Existence itself; now, no one can contest the fact that a form is always a limitation or that
a religion is of necessity always a form – not, that goes without saying, by virtue of its
internal Truth, which is of a universal and supraformal order, but because of its mode of
expression, which, as such, cannot but be formal and therefore specific and limited. It can
never be said too often that a form is always a modality of a category of formal, and
therefore distinctive or multiple, manifestation, and is consequently but one modality
among others that are equally possible, their supraformal cause alone being unique. We
will also repeat – for this is metaphysically of great importance – that a form, by the very
fact that it is limited, necessarily leaves something outside itself, namely, that which its
limits exclude; and this something, if it belongs to the same order, is necessarily
analogous to the form under consideration, since the distinction between forms must
needs be compensated by an indistinction or relative identity that prevents them from
being absolutely distinct from each other, for that would entail the absurd idea of a
plurality of unicities or Existences, each form representing a sort of divinity without any
relationship to other forms.
As we have just seen, the exoteric claim to the exclusive possession of the truth comes up
against the axiomatic objection that there is no such thing in existence as a unique fact,
for the simple reason that it is strictly impossible that such a fact should exist, unicity
alone being unique and no fact being unicity; it is this that is ignored by the ideology of
the “believers,” which is fundamentally nothing but an intentional and interested
confusion between the formal and the universal. The ideas that are affirmed in one
religious form (as, for example, the idea of the Word or of the Divine Unity) cannot fail
to be affirmed, in one way or another, in all other religious forms; similarly the means of
grace or of spiritual realization at the disposal of one priestly order cannot but possess
their equivalent elsewhere; and indeed, the more important and indispensable any
particular means of grace may be, the more certain is it that it will be found in all the
orthodox forms in a mode appropriate to the environment in question.
The foregoing can be summed up in the following formula: pure and absolute Truth can
only be found beyond all its possible expressions; these expressions, as such, cannot
claim the attributes of this Truth; their relative remoteness from it is expressed by their
differentiation and multiplicity, by which they are strictly limited. [TUR, The Limitations
of Exoterism]
To say form is to say exclusion of possibilities, whence the necessity for those excluded
to become realized in other forms, since what it “excludes” by definition, is condemned
to repeat itself. [CI, The Idea of “The Best” in Religions]
Form / Beauty: Forms can be snares just as they can be symbols and keys; beauty can
chain us to forms, just as it can also be a door opening towards the formless. [LAW, In
the Wake of the Fall]
Form / Essence: A form is a coagulated essence, which is to say that the relationship
resembles that between ice and water; the formal world – the material and animic states –
thus possesses the property of “congealing” spiritual substances, of individualizing them,
and hence of separating them more or less fundamentally from each other . . . What form
is with regard to essence, manifestation – whether essential or not – is with regard to the
Principle. [FSR, The Five Divine Presences]
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