glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

intellectual or heart knowledge, the principial realities grasped by the heart are
themselves prolonged in intellection; heart knowledge is one with what it knows, it is like
an uninterrupted ray of light . . . Apart from these two modes there is a third, and this is
the knowledge of faith. Faith amounts to an objectivized heart knowledge; what the
microcosmic heart does not tell us, the macrocosmic heart – the Logos – tells us in a
symbolic and partial language, and this for two reasons: to inform us concerning that of
which our soul is urgently in need, and to awaken in us as far as possible the
remembrance of innate truths.
If there is an intrinsically direct knowledge, which nevertheless is extrinsically
objectivized as to its communication, there must correlatively be a knowledge which in
itself is indirect, but which nevertheless is subjective as to its operation, and this is the
discernment of objective things from the starting point of their subjective equivalents,
given that reality is one; for there is nothing in the macrocosm that does not derive from
the metacosm and which is not to be found again in the microcosm.
Direct and inward knowledge, that of the Heart-Intellect, is what the Greeks called
gnosis; the word “esoterism” – according to its etymology – signifies gnosis inasmuch as
it de facto underlies the religious, and thus dogmatic doctrines. [EPW, Understanding
Esoterism]
Knowledge (of the relative / absolute): In reality, knowledge of the contingent and the
relative is necessarily contingent and relative; not in the sense that it would not be
adequate – because adequacy is the very nature of knowledge – but in the sense that we
can only perceive one aspect of the object at a time, and this depends on our standpoint,
that of the subject, precisely. Only knowledge of the Absolute is absolute, and it is so
because, in gnosis, the Absolute knows itself in the depths of the human subject; this is
the whole mystery of divine immanence in the microcosm. [THC, Universal Categories]
Knowledge (principial) / Rationalism: It is worth recalling here that in metaphysics
there is no empiricism: principial knowledge cannot stem from any experience, even
though experiences – scientific or other – can be the occasional causes of the intellect’s
intuitions. The sources of our transcendent intuitions are innate data, consubstantial with
pure intelligence, but de facto “forgotten” since the “loss of Paradise”; thus principial
knowledge, according to Plato, is nothing other than a “recollection,” and this is a gift,
most often actualized by intellectual and spiritual disciplines, Deo juvante.
Rationalism, taken in its broadest sense, is the very negation of Platonic anamnesis; it
consists in seeking the elements of certitudes in phenomena rather than in our very being.
[RHC, Preface]
Liberty: Liberty . . . is limited to the extent that it is relative, but it is really liberty in so
far as it is liberty and not something else. [LT, Rationalism, Real and Apparent]
What then is liberty considered independently of free creatures, or of the particular case
of a free creature? It is the consciousness of an unlimited diversity of possibilities, and
this consciousness is an aspect of Being itself. To those who maintain that only a given
experience of liberty such as that of a bird is concrete, and not liberty in itself (which in
their view is no more than a purely mental abstraction), the reply must be made, without
it being necessary to deny the existence of abstraction in the reason, that liberty in itself is
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