glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

sham absolutes, which in addition are often negative, subversive, and destructive. [THC,
To Have a Center]
Humanism (contradiction of): The initial contradiction of humanism is that, if one man
can prescribe for himself an ideal that pleases him, so too can someone else, for the same
reason, prescribe for himself another ideal, or indeed nothing at all; and in fact amoral
humanism is almost as ancient as moralistic humanism . . . The moral ideal of humanism
is inefficacious because it is subject to the tastes of the moment, or to fashion, if one
wishes; for positive qualities are fully human only in connection with the will to surpass
oneself, hence only in relation to what transcends us. Just as man’s reason for being does
not lie within man as such, so too, man’s qualities do not represent an end in themselves;
it is not for nothing that deifying gnosis requires the virtues. A quality is fully legitimate
only on condition that in the last analysis it be linked to necessary Being, not to mere
contingency, that is, to what is merely possible. [THC, To Have a Center]
Humanitarianism: ‘Humanitarianism’ in fact puts itself forward as a philosophy
founded on the idea that man is good; but to believe that man is good is almost always to
believe that God is bad, or that He would be bad ‘if He existed’; and as modern men
believe less and less in God – apart from a totally inoperative scientific ‘deism’ – they
pour out over God’s representatives the resentment that they would like to show against
God Himself: man is good, they think, but religions are bad; priests, who have invented
religions in order to bolster up their own interests and perpetuate their privileges, are bad,
and so on. It is the satanic inversion of the traditional axiom that God is good and man is
bad: God can be called ‘good’ because all possible goodness derives from Him and every
quality expresses – in an ‘indirectly direct’ manner – His Essence, and not only such and
such a function; and man is bad because his will no longer conforms to the profound
nature of things, hence to the divine ‘Being’, and his false ‘instinct of self-preservation’
makes itself the advocate of every passion and every terrestrial illusion. [GDW,
Vicissitudes of Different Spiritual Temperaments]
No doubt some will say that humanitarianism, far from being materialistic by definition,
aims at reforming human nature by education and legislation; now it is contradictory to
want to reform the human outside the divine since the latter is the essence of the former;
to make the attempt is in the end to bring about miseries far worse than those from which
one was trying to escape. Philosophical humanitarianism underestimates the immortal
soul by the very fact that it overestimates the human animal; it is somewhat obliged to
denigrate saints in order to better whitewash criminals; the one seems unable to go
without the other. From this results oppression of the contemplatives from their most
tender years: in the name of humanitarian egalitarianism, vocations are crushed and
geniuses wasted, by schools in particular and by official worldliness in general; every
spiritual element is banished from professional and public life* and this amounts to
removing from life a great part of its content and condemning religion to a slow death.
The modern leveling – which may call itself “democratic” – is the very antipodes of the
theocratic equality of the monotheistic religions, for it is founded, not on the
theomorphism of man, but on his animality and his rebellion.
(* On the other hand, by a kind of compensation, professional life more and more
assumes a “religious” air in the sense that it claims the whole of man, his soul as well as
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