glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

Intellect, or to be more precise, between the logic of anxiety and the transcendence of
serenity; the gap is incommensurable and yet the second term is already hidden within the
first; it is, so to speak, already within reach.
In spiritual life, he who says “to will” says “to will a Good”; “to will a Good” is “to will
well,” that is to say to “will through the Good,” or “through God”; instead of “to will”
one could say “the Beautiful.” On the other hand, he who says “to know” says “to know
that which is”; he who says “to know that which is,” says, in a final analysis, “to be that
which
knows”: the Self.
Gnosis, it must be repeated, is the participation – however precarious and conditional, yet
possible since we could not be in every respect absolutely “distinct” from God, since
otherwise we would be devoid of reality – gnosis, then, is our participation in the
“perspective” of the divine Subject which, in turn, dwells beyond the separative polarity
“subject-object,” which however in no way signifies that it does not bear within itself, in
a manner conforming with its Essence, the cause of all cosmic polarizations; this means
that we can indeed discern something like a polarity in it, but on condition of not seeing
there any separation or opposition . . . In one of his hymns to Hari, Shri Shankaracharya
says: “Lord, although I and thou make but One, I belong to Thee, but not Thou to me, just
as the waves belong to the sea, but not the sea to the waves.” And in another hymn,
Shankara expresses himself thus: “That which is the cessation of mental agitation and the
supreme peace; that which is the lake Manikarnika and the pilgrimage of pilgrimages;
that which is the primordial, most pure Ganges, the river of Knowledge; that is Benares,
inborn Wisdom, and that is what I am.” [LS, Gnosis, Language of the Self]
Gnostic: That the gnostic – in the orthodox sense of the term – bases himself
extrinsically on a given sacred Scripture or on some other gnostic cannot prevent him
from thinking in an intrinsically free manner by virtue of the freedom proper to the
immanent Truth, or proper to the Essence which by definition escapes formal constraints.
Or again: whether the gnostic “thinks” what he has “seen” with the “eye of the heart,” or
whether on the contrary he obtains his “vision” thanks to the intervention – preliminary
and provisional and in no wise efficient – of a thought which then takes on the role of
occasional cause, is a matter of indifference with regard to the truth, or with regard to its
almost supernatural springing forth in the spirit. [SVQ, Tracing the Notion of Philosophy]
Gnosticism: Gnosticism – which despite its errors contains many a truth – distinguishes
three fundamental types: the pneumatic, whose nature is ascending; the hylic or somatic,
whose nature is descending; and the psychic, whose nature is ambiguous. [THC, Survey
of Integral Anthropology]
God: What must be understood by the term “God”? From the strictly human point of
view, which alone is what religions as such have in view, “God” could not be the
Absolute as such, for the Absolute has no interlocutor; we may, however, say that God is
the hypostatic Face turned towards the human world, or towards a particular human
world; in other words, God is Divinity which personalizes itself in view of man and
insofar as it more or less takes on the countenance of a particular humanity. Another
question: what does this personalized Divinity, this God become partner or interlocutor,
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