glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

espect for the accidents that manifest it; to worship God “in spirit and in truth” is also to
respect Him through the veil that is man, which practically amounts to saying that one
must respect the potential sanctity that is in every man, in so far as it is reasonably
possible for us to do so; in a word, to accept, if not to understand, the transcendence of
the Creator is to recognize His immanence in creatures. We owe it to others to show
them, as far as is possible, that we do not stop short at their earthly accidence, but that on
the contrary we wish to take cognizance of their heavenly substance, and this excludes all
triviality in social behaviour. Politeness is a distant manner of helping our neighbour to
sanctify himself, or to remember that, being made of sanctity as the image of God, he is
thereby made for sanctity. To say respect for one’s neighbour is to say respect for
oneself, for what is true for others is also true for us; man is always a virtual saint.
Dignity is imposed on us by our deiformity, by our sense of the sacred, by our knowledge
and our worship of God; integral nobility is part of faith.
The noble man always maintains himself at the center; he never loses sight of the symbol,
the spiritual gift of things, the sign of God, a gratitude that is both ascending and
radiating. [EPW, The Virtues in the Way]
Gratitude (towards God): Gratitude towards God is to appreciate the value of what God
gives us and of what He has given us from our birth. [EchPW, 60]
Gratitude (towards man): Gratitude towards man is to appreciate the value of what
others give us, including surrounding nature; these gifts coincide ultimately with the gifts
of God. [EchPW, 60]
Gunas: The three cosmic tendencies resulting from the universal Substance, Prakriti:
they are, firstly sattva, the luminous and ascendant tendency; secondly rajas, the fiery,
horizontal and expansive tendency; thirdly tamas, which is obscure and descendant.
[RHC, Mahashakti]
Hatred: If God alone has the right to punish, it is because He is beyond the ego; hatred
means to arrogate to oneself the place of God, to forget one’s human sharing of a
common misery, to attribute to one’s own ‘I’ a kind of absoluteness, detaching it from
that substance of which individuals are only so many contractions or knots. It is true that
God sometimes delegates his right of punishment to man in so far as he rises above the
‘I’, or must and can so rise; but to be the instrument of God is to be without hatred
against man. In hatred, man forgets ‘original sin’ and thereby loads himself, in a certain
sense, with the sin of the other; it is because we make God of ourselves whenever we
hate, that we must love our enemies. To hate another is to forget that God alone is perfect
and that God alone is Judge. In good logic one can hate only ‘in God’ and ‘for God’; we
must hate the ego, not the ‘immortal soul’, and hate him who hates God, and not
otherwise, which amounts to saying that we should hate his hatred of God and not his
soul. Likewise, when Christ says that it is necessary to ‘hate’ one’s ‘father and mother’,
that means that it is necessary to reject whatever in them is ‘against God’, that is to say
the attachment which serves as an obstacle in respect of ‘the one thing needful’. Such
‘hatred’ implies for those whom it concerns a virtual liberation; it is then, on the plane of
eschatological realities, an act of love. [GDW, Of the Cross]
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