glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

it is of this we are speaking – such as allows God to think in us, if such an expression be
permissible . . .
God is “Light” “before” He is “Heat,” if it may be so expressed; gnosis “precedes” love,
or rather, love “follows” gnosis, since the latter includes love after its own fashion,
whereas love is not other than the beatitude that has “come forth” from gnosis. One can
love something false, without love ceasing to be what it is; but one cannot “know” the
false in a similar way, that is to say knowledge cannot be under illusion as to its object
without ceasing to be what it is; error always implies a privation of knowledge, whereas
sin does not imply a privation of will. Therein lies a most important application of the
symbolism of the Adamic androgyne and of the creation of Eve: it is only after the
“coming forth” of love outside knowledge – whence the polarization of “intelligence”
and “will” – that the temptation and fall could – or can – take place; in one sense, the
rational faculty became detached from Intellect through the intrusion of will, seduced by
“the serpent” and become “free” from below, that is to say rendered capable of making
choice between true and false; choice of the false having once become possible, it was
bound to present itself as a seduction of torrential force; reason, mother of the “wisdom
according to the flesh” is the “natural child” issued from Adam’s sin. Here the serpent
represents what Hindus understand by tamas, that tendency which is “downward,”
“towards obscurity,” “compressive” and at the same time “dispersive” and “dissolving”
and which on contact with the human person becomes personified as Satan. The question:
“why does evil exist?” amounts, in short, to asking why there is an existence; the serpent
is to be found in Paradise because Paradise exists. Paradise without the serpent would be
God.
. . . Gnosis by the very fact that it is a knowing and not a willing, is centered in “that
which is” and not in “that which ought to be”; there results from this a way of regarding
the world and life that is greatly different from the way, more “meritorious” perhaps but
less “true,” in which predominantly volitive minds regard the vicissitudes of existence.
The background of the drama of life is, for the bhakta, the “Will of God” and, for the
jnana, the nature of things; the accepting of his fate results, for the former, from
unconditional love, from “that which must be”; for the latter, acceptance results from
discernment of metaphysical necessity, therefore, from “that which is.” The bhakta
accepts all fate as coming from the Beloved; he also accepts it because he makes no
distinction between “me” and “others” and because, by this very fact, he cannot rebel
against an event merely because it has happened to himself and not to some other person;
if he accepts everything out of love of God, he also does so, on this same basis, out of
love of his neighbor. The attitude of the jnani, on the other hand, is an impassability
founded upon discernment between the Real and the unreal: “The world is false, Brahma
is true”; “That art thou” (Tat Tvam Asi); “All is Atma”; “I am Brahma.” Events of life
arise, as do all phenomena, out of the indefinitely varying combinations of the three
“cosmic qualities” (the gunas: sattva, rajas and tamas); these events therefore cannot but
be, to the extent that the world is relatively real; but as soon as that relativity is
transcended, they cease to exist and then there is no longer a “good” or an “evil,” nor any
karmic causation; the plane of the gunas (“simultaneous” qualities) and of karma (made
up of “successive” qualities) is as if annihilated in the undifferentiated serenity of Being
or of the Self. And similarly, there is no “juridical” relationship between the
astonishments, anxieties and indignations of the soul and the unconditional serenity of the
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