glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

implies – or proves – that what confers on our intelligence the power to accomplish to the
full what it can accomplish, and what makes it wholly what it is, is the Absolute alone.*
(* “Neither in the earth nor in the heavens is there room for Me (Allah) but in the heart of
My believing servant there is room for Me” (hadith qudsi). Similarly Dante: “I perceive
that our intellect is never satisfied, if the True does not enlighten it, outside which no
truth is possible” (Paradiso III, 124-126).) [LAW, Religio Perennis]
Intelligence is the perception of a reality, and a fortiori the perception of the Real as such.
It is ipso facto discernment between the Real and the unreal – or the less real . . .
Intelligence gives rise not only to discernment, but also – ipso facto – to the awareness of
our superiority in relation to those who do not know how to discern; contrary to what
many moralists think, this awareness is not in itself a fault, for we cannot help being
aware of something that exists and is perceptible to us thanks to our intelligence,
precisely. It is not for nothing that objectivity is one of man’s privileges.
But the same intelligence that makes us aware of a superiority, also makes us aware of
the relativity of this superiority and, more than this, it makes us aware of all our
limitations. This means that an essential function of intelligence is self-knowledge: hence
the knowledge – positive or negative according to the aspects in view – of our own
nature.
To know God, the Real in itself, the supremely Intelligible, and then to know things in
the light of this knowledge, and in consequence also to know ourselves: these are the
dimensions of intrinsic and integral intelligence, the only one worthy of the name, strictly
speaking, since it alone is properly human.
We have said that intelligence produces, by its very essence, self-knowledge, with the
virtues of humility and charity; but it may also produce, outside its essence or nature and
as a consequence of a luciferian perversion, that vice of vices which is pride. Hence the
ambiguity of the notion of “intelligence” in religious moralities, along with the
accentuation of a humility which is expressly extra-intellectual, and for that very reason
ambiguous and dangerous in its turn, since “there is no right superior to that of the
Truth.” [RHC, On Intelligence]
Intelligence is the perception of the real and not the “intellectualization” of the unreal.
[THC, Universal Categories]
Man is intelligence, and intelligence is the transcending of forms and the realization of
the invisible Essence; to say human intelligence is to say absoluteness and transcendence.
[TM, Reflections on Ideological Sentimentalism]
Intelligence, by definition, must be disposed of in view of the knowable, which means at
the same time that it must reflect the divine Intelligence, and it is for that reason that man
is said to be “made in the image of God.” [FDH, Transcendence is Not Contrary to
Sense]
Intelligence (four functions): Objectivity, subjectivity, activity, passivity; in the mind,
these are reason, intuition, imagination and memory. By “objectivity” we mean that
knowledge is inspired by data which are exterior to it, and this is so in the case of reason;
by “subjectivity” on the contrary, it must be understood that the knowledge in question
operates through existential analogy, this is to say that it is inspired by data which the
subject bears within himself: thus, we have no need of reasoning in order to observe the
natural mechanism of another subjectivity, and this is the faculty of intuition. In
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