The Primacy of Intellection
It has been said that the proof of an affirmation is incumbent upon him who enunciates the thesis, not upon him who rejects it; but this is a perfectly arbitrary opinion, for if someone owes us a proof for a positive affirmation, he equally owes us one for a negative affirmation; it is not the positive character of the affirmation, it is the absoluteness of its character that obliges us to prove it, whether its content is positive or negative. There is no need to prove an inexistence that one supposes, but one is obliged to prove an inexistence that one affirms. It is true that those who deny the supernatural do not lack arguments which in their eyes are proofs of their opinion, but nonetheless they imagine that their opinion is a natural axiom that needs no demonstration; this is rationalist juridicism, not pure logic. Theists, on the contrary, feel that it is normal to support by proofs the reality of the Invisible, except when they speak pro domo, basing themselves upon the evidence of faith or gnosis.
No Activity without Truth
In our time one has often heard it said that in order to fight against materialism—or materialist pseudo-idealism—a new ideology is needed, one capable of standing up to all seductions and assaults. Now the need for an ideology, or the wish to oppose one ideology to another, is already an admission of weakness, and anything undertaken on this basis is false and doomed to defeat. What must be done is to oppose truth purely and simply to the false ideologies, that same truth that has always been and which we could never invent for the reason that it exists outside us and above us. The present-day world is obsessed with “dynamism”, as if this constituted a “categorical imperative” and a universal remedy, and as if dynamism had any meaning or positive efficacy outside truth.
To Refuse or To Accept Revelation
Many Koranic stories present to us, with even more insistence than the Bible, the following motif: the prophets preach and the people reject the message; God punishes them for this rejection; and He rewards those men who believe.
His Holiness and the Medicine Man
It happened during my first visit to the Red Indians of the North American Plains, ten years ago. A spiritual encounter between His Holiness the Jagadguru and a Red Indian holy man has taken place, through the medium of a picture of His Holiness and a prayer of the Red Indian.
A note on René Guénon
The question has been asked why Guénon “chose the Islamic path” and not another; the “material” reply is that he really had no choice, given that he did not admit the initiatic nature of the Christian sacraments and that Hindu initiation was closed to him because of the caste system; given also that at that period Buddhism appeared to him to be a heterodoxy. The key to the problem is that Guénon was seeking an initiation and nothing else; Islam offered this to him, with all the essential and secondary elements that must normally accompany it. Again, it is not certain that Guénon would have entered Islam had he not settled in a Muslim country; he had already been given an Islamic initiation in France through the intermediation of Abdul-Hadi, and at that time he did not dream of practicing the Muslim religion. Thus, in accepting a Shadilite initiation, it was initiation that Guénon chose, and not a “path”.
Ambiguity of the Emotional Element
Not to be “emotional”: this seems, nowadays, to be the very condition of “objectivity,” whereas in reality objectivity is independent of the presence or absence of a sentimental element. No doubt, the word “emotional” is deservedly pejorative when emotion determines thought, or creates it as it were; that is, when emotion is the cause and not the consequence of thought; but this same word ought to have a neutral meaning when emotion simply accompanies or stresses a correct thought; that is, when it is the consequence of thought and not its cause. It is true that a purely passional opinion may accidentally coincide with reality, but this does not invalidate the distinguo we have just established.
To be Man is to Know
The evidence for the transcendent unity of religions results not only from the oneness of Truth but also from the oneness of the human race. The sufficient reason for the existence of the human creature is the capacity to think; not to think just anything, but to think about what matters, and finally, about what alone matters. Man is the only being on earth able to foresee death and to desire survival, the only being who desires to know and is capable of knowing the why of the world, of the soul, of existence. No one can deny that it is in the fundamental nature of man to ask himself these questions and to have, in consequence, the right to answers; and, further, to have access to them, precisely by virtue of this right, whether through Revelation or through Intellection, each of these sources of knowledge acting according to its own laws and within the framework of the conditions that correspond to it.
The Problem of Sexuality
It would be impossible for the spiritual life in itself to exclude a domain as fundamental, humanly speaking, as sexuality; sex is an aspect of man. Traditionally the West is marked by a theology of Augustinian inspiration, which explains marriage from a more or less utilitarianist angle, while neglecting the intrinsic reality of the thing. According to this perspective—leaving aside every apologetic euphemism—sexual union in itself is sin; consequently the child is born in sin, but the Church compensates, or rather more than compensates, for this evil with a greater good, namely baptism, faith, sacramental life. According to the primordial perspective, on the other hand, which is founded on the intrinsic nature of the realities concerned, the sexual act is a “naturally supernatural” sacrament. In primordial man sexual ecstasy coincides with spiritual ecstasy, it communicates to man an experience of mystical union, a “remembrance” of the divine Love of which human love is a distant reflection; an ambiguous reflection, certainly, since the image is at one and the same time both adequate and inverted.
The Degrees of Art
Traditional art derives from a creativity which combines heavenly inspiration with ethnic genius, and which does so in the manner of a science endowed with rules and not by way of individual improvisation; ars sine scientia nihil.
The work of the artist or craftsman comprises two perfections, namely perfection of surface and perfection of depth. At surface level, the work must be well done, in conformity with the laws of the art and the demands of the style; in depth, it must be able to communicate the reality which it expresses. This explains why traditional art is related to esoterism as regards its form and to spiritual realization as regards its practice; for the form expresses the essence, and an understanding of the form awakens the need to transcend it with a view to its essence or archetype.