glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

knowledge which determines action, manifestation, form, and not the reverse. [LS,
Principles and Criteria of Art]
Art (authentic and normative): Authentic and normative art always tends to combine
intelligent observation of nature with noble and profound stylizations in order, first, to
assimilate the work to the model created by God in nature and, secondly, to separate it
from physical contingency by giving it an imprint of pure spirit, of synthesis, of what is
essential. [LS, Principles and Criteria of Art]
Art (essential function of sacred art): The essential function of sacred art is to transfer
Substance, which is both one and inexhaustible, into the world of accident and to bring
the accidental consciousness back to Substance. One could say also that sacred art
transposes Being to the world of existence, of action or of becoming, or that it transposes
in a certain way the Infinite to the world of the finite, or Essence to the world of forms; it
thereby suggests a continuity proceeding from the one to the other, a way starting from
appearance or accident and opening onto Substance or its celestial reverberations. [LT,
The Argument Founded on Substance]
Art (function): Art has a function that is both magical and spiritual: magical, it renders
present principles, powers and also things that it attracts by virtue of a “sympathetic
magic”; spiritual, it exteriorizes truths and beauties in view of our interiorization, of our
return to the “kingdom of God that is within you.” The Principle becomes manifestation
so that manifestation might rebecome the Principle, or so that the “I” might return to the
Self; or simply, so that the human soul might, through given phenomena, make contact
with the heavenly archetypes, and thereby with its own archetype. [TM, Art, Its Duties
and Its Rights]
Art (general): Art is in a general way both a means of expression and a means of
assimilation: expression of our qualitative – not arbitrary and chaotic – personality, and
assimilation of the archetypes thus projected; it is therefore a movement from ourselves
to ourselves, or from the immanent Self to transcendent Being, and conversely; a purely
empirical “ourselves” means nothing, all values being rooted in the Absolute. [THC,
Message of a Vestimentary Art]
Art (mission of): To remove the shells in order to reveal the kernels; to distill the
materials until the essences are extracted. Nobility is nothing else but a natural
disposition for this alchemy, and this on all planes. [THC, To Have a Center]
Art (modern conception): The modern conception of art is false insofar as it puts
creative imagination – or even simply the impulse to create – in the place of qualitative
form, or insofar as a subjective and conjectural valuation is substituted for an objective
and spiritual one; to do this is to replace by talent alone – by talent real or illusory – that
skill and craftsmanship which must needs enter into the very definition of art, as if talent
could have meaning apart from the normative constants that are its criteria. [LS,
Principles and Criteria of Art]
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