We live in a world wherein the abuse of intelligence
replaces wisdom.
Prerogatives of the Human State
Prerogatives:
- total intelligence: to know the Truth;
- free will: to will the Good;
- sentiment capable of disinterestedness: to love the
Beautiful.
The effects of the “Fall” weaken the prerogatives of human
nature, but they cannot abolish them without abolishing man himself.
Every man is endowed with “religious instinct”.
The Truth:
- horizontally – the cosmic (phenomenal) order;
- vertically – the metaphisical (principial) order;
The Good:
- practical, secondary, contingent;
- spiritual, essential, absolute.
The Beauty:
- outward;
- sacred art, traditional crafts.
Man is Intelligence, Strenght and Virtue.
Fear of God – resignation to the Divine Will.
Love of God – trust in Mercy.
Fear and Love towards God becomes respect and good will
towards the neighbor.
“Sincere love is not a roundabout way of loving oneself; it
is founded upon an object worthy of admiration, of adoration, of desire for
union; and the quintessence of every love, and even of every virtue, can only
be the love of God.” (p. 2)
“The idea of the Absolute implies on the one hand that of
the relative and on the other that of relationships between the two, namely the
prefiguration of the relative in the Absolute and the projection of the
Absolute in the relative; the first relationship gives rise to the personal
God, and the second, to the supreme Angel.” (p. 3)
Metatron of the Kabbalah = Ruh of the Koran = Buddhi
(Trimurti) of the Vedanta = Holy Ghost of the Christian doctrine.
We know and love, not what we will, but rather we will what
we know and love; it is not the will that determines our personality, it is
intelligence and sentiment.
God (beauty) => piety (virtue)
myself (beauty) => humility (virtue)
others (beauty) => charity (virtue)
piety – the sense of the sacred, of the transcendent, of
profundity;
holiness – joy through God and peace in Him;
humility – awareness of our metaphysical nothingness;
charity – awareness of the divine immanence in beings and in
things;
the substance of the soul – the unconscious search for a
lost Paradise.
The normal and non-perverted man cannot live without beauty.
rigourous virtues – courage, incorruptibility
Every virtue, be it combative or adamantine, is connected
directly or indirectly with the love of God, otherwise it could not be a
virtue.
piety (virtue) – impiety (vice)
humility (virtue) – pride (vice)
charity (virtue) – egoism (vice)
Goodness is integral only in condition of being combined
with strenght.
The effort toward virtue is a kind of virtue if the
intention is sincere.
Beauty is the substance, ugliness the accident.
Love is the substance, hate the accident.
Good is the substance, evil the accident.
The essence of intelligence can only be union, synthesis,
not analysis, or contemplation, not discrimination.
The essence of the will is the choice of the good and the
actualization of this choice.
The essence of the sentiment is nonetheless love, because
the essence of the Real is beauty, goodness, beatitude.
“Brahman is Reality” – “the world is merely appearence” –
“the soul is not different from Brahman”.
“God alone is” – “there is no other divinity” – “Muhammad is
the Messenger of God”.
“In the doctrinal message of Islam as well as in the Hindu
message, the affirmation of transcendence is defined extrinsically by means of
a relativizing negative affirmation, which in its turn is surpassed by a
compensatory affirmation of immanence.” (p. 9)
Definition: Integral and primordial man is the Intellect and
the consciousness of the Absolute.
Man is faith and the idea of God; immanent Holly Spirit on
the one hand, and transcendent truth on the other.
intelligence + will = “capability” of the individual
sensibility + will = “character” of the individual
intelligence + sensibility = “scope” of the individual
Virtue is the touchstone of our sincerity. Without it, Truth
does not belong to us and the Way eludes us.
The Truth is what we must know.
The Way is what we must do.
The Virtue is what we must love, become and be.
Truth – doctrine
Way – method
Virtue – qualification.
Platon: “Goodness is the splendor of the true.”
The difference between animals and men is absolute and at
the same time relative: it is absolute with respect to the specifically human
prerogatives, and relatives with respect to the faculties as such.
Truth – meditative comprehension
Way – operative concentration
Virtue – psychic conformity
Reason has to have a positive aspect, it is inseparable from
language.
Reason becomes an infirmity only in the case of abusive
speculation by the ignorants who pretends to knowledge.
Man knows he must die, whereas animals do not.
Without religion a human collectivity cannot survive in the
long run; that is, it cannot remain human.
Supreme Reality = Sovereign Good
Every reality as such bears witness to the Supreme Reality.
The contemplative dimension of the intellect coincides with
the ineffable.
Each of the prerogatives of the human state comprises 2
poles, an active and a passive:
- intelligence: discernment and contemplation/certitude and
serenity;
- will: decision and perseverance;
- soul: fervor and faithfulness.
If metaphysical knowledge remains purely mental, it is worth
practically nothing.
Man in the Cosmogonic Projection
The entire world is Maya, but Maya is not entirely the
world.
To say infinitude is to say All-Possibility and consequently
the overflowing of the divine potentialities.
Metaphysical necessity is not constraint any more than
liberty is arbitrariness.
The productions of the creative radiation are both
successive and simultaneous.
The end result of the manifesting trajectory is not a given
substance-container but the form-content, namely the thing created, the more or
less distant reflection of a given divine archetype.
The “privative accident” – the projection directly expresses
the movement away from the divine Source.
“Reintegration mode” – a mode that compensates and in a
certain sense overcome the phenomenon of evil. The circle of Maya closes in the
heart of deified man.
“Avataric mode” – intrinsically central mode, the “divine
Descent”, the Incarnation.
Animality can manifest modes of fall as well as modes of
perfection, but the animal species cannot fall.
Whether he wills it or not, man is “condemned” to
transcendence.
Altogether close to pride are doubt, bitterness and despair.
The great evil for man is not only to move away from God, it
is also to doubt in His Mercy.
Human body as a theophany: man being imago Dei, his body
necessarily symbolize a liberating return to the divine origin and in this
sense it is remembrance of God.
Universal correspondences are not limited to fundamental
images but also include the secondary aspects of the key-symbols.
God sees things in all the relationships involving them and
consequently evil for God is only a fragmentary, provisional, and altogether
extrinsic aspect of a good which compensates and ultimately annuls it. In other
words, God perceives evil only in its metaphysical indispensable context.
The great pitfall of the monotheistic theologies is the de
facto confusion between the personified Divinity and the suprapersonal
Divinity. There is no “God” which in one and the same respect is Being and
Beyond-Being, Personne and Essence, Gott and Gottheit, Ishvara and Baramatma; a
personal will is one thing, All Possibility is another.
Atma become Maya so that Maya become Atma (the phamous
formule of St. Ireneus, paraphrased in Vedantic terms).
The Play of Masks
The meaning of the Eckhartian distinction between the “inner
man” and the “outer man”: the latter identifies passively with his experience,
whereas the former may enjoy or suffer in his temporal humanity, while
remaining impassible in his immortal kernel which coincides with his state of
union with God.
Analogicaly speaking and with all due proportion, every
pneumatic is “true man and true God”.
The saint is detached because he does not identify with the
accidents; and he is good-willed because he could be neither egoistic nor petty.
There are three main types of human beings: pneumatic,
psychic and hylic.
In ordinary language, the word “mask” is synonymous with
“false appearance”, hence with insincerity. But symbolism acts like a mask toy:
it transmits the heavenly Message and at the same time dissimulates the
provisionally inassimilable mystery.
the veil – it expresses, affirms, manifests;
the mask – it dissimulates
the veil – it is used to appear “less than one is”
the mask – it is used if someone wishes to appear to be
“more than one is”
For the contemplative man, pleasure does not inflate the
individuality; on the contrary, it invites to a transpersonal dilation, so that
the “sensible” consolation gives rise to un upward opening and not to a
downward inflation.
Similar way of acting can hide dissimilar intentions.
There are sages whose sole duty is to attract souls towards
the “within”, and this is the rule. There are others who add to this function
that of creating sensible supports, and this is the exception (ex: St. Luke
painted the first icon of the Blessed Virgin, and this way the Christianity
obtained its entire artistic dimension; Jalal ad-Din Rumi introduced music and
dance into Sufism, not out of invention, but through inspiration).
The good manifests qualities, the bad on the contrary
manifests privations; but both alike are subject to the vicissitudes of
existence.
Our profound identity is our relationship with God; our mask
is the form that we must assume in the world of forms, of space, of time.
Ex Nihilo, In Deo
Creation “comes from” an origin, not from a cosmic, hence
“created” substance, but from a reality pertaining to the Creator. In this
sense, it can be said that the creation is situated in God.
Everything in fact “contains” on the one hand Being, and on
the other a given Archetype or “Idea”. The divine “content” is ipso facto also
the “container”, since God is Reality as such. But things are “outside God” in
respect of contingency, hence in respect of the concrete phenomena of the
world.
With the intention of resolving the problem of evil, some
have maintained that evil does not exist for God, and consequently that for Him
everything is a good, which is inadmissible and ill-sounding. What ought to be
said is that God sees the privative manifestations only in connection with the
positive manifestations that compensates for them; thus evil is a provisional
factor in view of a greater good.
There are two “ontological regions”: the Absolute and the
Relative. The first consists of Beyond-Being, and the second, of both Being and
Existence, of the Creator and Creation.
We may envisage two other “regions”, the Principial and the
Manifested. The first category comprises Beyond-Being and Being – this is the
“Divine Order” – and the second, Existence, the Universe, the world.
The celestial world is Atma only by analogy, in the sense
that it is the reflection of the Principle within Manifestation, and this
confers upon it, in relation to the world of imperfection and impermanence, a
quasi-divine function.
In saying that “God alone is good”, Christ meant to specify,
not that the angels and the blessed are deprived of goodness, but that only the
Principial Order is situated beyond even the accidental possibility of
imperfection.
“God became man that man might become God.” – The Essence
limited itself by form so that the form might be liberated by the Essence.
In the Face of Contingency
What makes us happy are the phenomena of beauty and goodness
and all the other goods that existence borrows from pure Being. What adds
shadows to them is contingency.
We are situated in the contingency, but we live by the
reflections of the Absolute, otherwise we could not exist.
Agents of contingency: space, time, form, number, matter,
individuality.
The contingency plunges us into a climate of relativity,
ambiguity, indefiniteness, and inflicts upon us temptations of incertitude and
ingratitude.
Wisdom is not only to see the archetype through the form or
the heavenly in the earthly, it is also to be resign to contingency; we must
indeed be someone and be someplace, even if we are aware of the possibility of
being someone else and of being somewhere else, that is, of experiencing a
given element of happiness in another form.
Two fundamental virtues to realize:
a) resignation to contingency;
b) assimilation of the celestial message.
“[...] for everything lies in discovering that ontologically
we bear within ourselves that which we love and which in the final analysis
constitutes our reason for being.” (p. 44)
Metaphysical comprehension ought to be accompanied by a
sense of beauty at every level; conversely, there is no interiorization of the
beautiful without a parallel metaphysical knowledge.
Why something is deemed beautiful?
Subjectivists: it is because it pleases us.
Every beautiful thing communicates to us beauty as such,
namely the Harmony of the Sovereign Good.
Beauty has something pacifying and dilating in it something
consoling and liberating, because it communicates a substance of truth, of
evidence and of certitude, and it does so in a concrete and existential mode.
Matter is spiritually transparent and it can concretely be
the vehicle of the celestial message, but it can also be the door towards that
which is below and it has even subjugated humanity by impurity, sickness, old
age and death, so that its domain will always be an exile for man.
Some people think that the word is a production for our
mind, whereas our mind is capable neither of creating nor of preventing the
existence of an object. True, the world is a dream, but this dream is not ours
since we are contents of it; the absolute subject escapes us as much as does
the absolute Object, hence as much as their supreme indistinction.
Contingency:
- relativity;
- absoluteness.
The principle of relativity – things appear other than what
they are in fact.
The principle of absoluteness – things are symbolically
adequate.
If one looks at the universe exclusively with the eyes of
relativity, one will see only relative things and the universe will be reduced
to an inextricable absurdity. If one seesn it with the eyes of absoluteness,
one will essentially see manifestations of the Supreme Principle and images
making explicit the relationships between Atma and Maya.
Relativity is a projection of the Absolute, or it is
nothing.
Contingency is always relative, but relativity is not always
contingent.
That is relative which is either “more” or “less” in
relation to another reality; that is contingent which may or may not be, hence
which is merely possible.
In geometric symbolism, the radii indicate the celestial
archetypes or the “ideas”; and the concentric circles, the orders of
contingency.
Descartes said: “I think, therefore I am.” He should say: “I
am, therefore Being is.”
In any event, the foundation of metaphysical certitude is
the coincidence between truth and our being; a coincidence that no ratiocination
could invalidate.
Universal truths draw their evidence not from our contingent
thought, but from our transpersonal being, which constitutes the substance of
our spirit and guarantees the adequacy of intellection.
We must maintain the balance between:
- temporal disturbances and eternal values;
- the beauties of this world and those of the other;
- the terrestrial projections and the celestial archetypes.
Delineations of Original Sin
The venial sins become serious when they are habitual, for
then they are vices.
There is in our soul a tendency to “outwardness” and
“horizontality” which constitutes, if not original sin properly called, at
least the hereditary vice that is derived therefrom.
To affirm that every man is a “sinner” does not amount to
saying that no man is capable of abstaining from evil actions, but it certainly
means that all men – with the rarest exception – succumb to the temptation of
“outwardness” (concupiscence) and “horizontality” (impiety).
If the requirement of the supreme Commandment is to “love
God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and
with all thy mind”, it follows that the contrary attitude is the supreme sin.
To be “horizontal” is to love only terrestrial life, to the
detriment of the ascending and celestial path.
To be “exteriorized” is to love only outer things, to the
detriment of moral and spiritual values.
Horizontality is to sin against transcendence, to forget God
and consequently the meaning of life.
Outwardness is to sin against immanence, to forget our
immortal soul and consequently its vocation.
Primordial perfection was made of “verticality” and
“inwardness”, as is attested by those distinctive characteristics of man which
are vertical posture and language.
Transcendence = metaphysical Truth and saving Divinity;
Immanence = transpersonal Intellect and divine Selfhood.
The forbidden tree was that of the discernment between
“good” and “evil”. This discernment pertains to the very nature of Being, its
source could not be in the creature. To claim it for oneself is to wish to be
equal to the Creator, and that is the very essence of sin.
The great ambiguity of the human phenomenon resides in the
fact that man is divine without being God.
The fall was the rupture between reason and Intellect, the
ego and the Self.
On Intention
One and the same action may be good or bad according to the
intention, whereas the inverse is not true: an intention is not good or bad
according to the action.
To excuse a blameworthy action or production by arguing that
the intention was good, is meaningful only in the following cases:
a) when the negative result is contrary to what the agent
willed;
b) when there are serious reasons for supposing that the
badness of the action or production is due only to an accidental lack of skill;
c) when there are valid reasons for supposing that the intention of a person well known to
be imperfect or bad was good in the given case;
d) when the agent is substantially incapable of executing
his project in a satisfactory manner;
e) when an act of an extrinsically paradoxical, or even
blamesworthy, work is comprehensible only in the light of its spiritual
intention.
The idea that the argument of intention is a panacea has
become so habitual that too many people abuse it without reflecting.
intentionism
sincerism
To be “sincere” is to show oneself “as one is”,
unconditionally and cynically, hence counter to any effort to be what one ought
to be.
humility + hypocrisy = egalitarian and demagogic humility
charity + hypocrisy = humanistic and bitter charity
sincerity + hypocrisy = cynical sincerity
There are false virtues whose motives are basically to
demonstrate to oneself that one has no need of God. In this case, the virtues
are imaginary, since pride perverts them.
“Metaphysical discernment first of all, then concentration
that is sincere – because conformity to discernment – and quasi-permanent :
this is the very foundation of operative spirituality, whatever might be its
modes or degrees.” (p. 66)
Man has the right to be legitimately traumatised only by
monstruosities.
To the sincerism in fashion, secrecy is something hateful,
since, from that point of view, to be sincere is to hide nothing, and to hide
something is to be dishonest or hypocritical.
For the mentality of “our times”, sincerity is vulgarity.
Intention essentially comprises two dimensions: firstly, the
good ought to be done, and secondly, it ought to be well done.
Remarks on Charity
Charity is goodness in action, beneficial action in relation
to those who need it.
Charity – to be considerate of others’ feelings.
Elementary virtue has always required that charity be done
as modestly as possible.
Charity is to freely, and really, help those who need and
deserve it.
No Initiative without Truth
We don’t need false technologies, what must be done is to
counter false ideologies with the truth that has been always been and that we
could never invent, since it exists outside us and above us.
What is lacking in today’s world is a penetrating and
comprehensive knowledge of the nature of things; the fundamental truths are
always accessible, but they could not be imposed on those who refuse to take
them into consideration.
Tradition speaks to each man the language he can understand,
provided he be willing to listen; this reservation is essential for tradition
cannot become bankrupt.
The humanism is a “pre-atheism”, since it prepared the
ground for atheism properly called.
“The internal contradiction of Marxism is that it wants to
build a perfect humanity while destroying man; which is to say that militant
atheists, more impassioned than realistic, wish to overlook that religion is so
to speak an ecological question. Assuming that religion comprises an element of
“opium” – not only “for the people” – this element is “ecologically”
indispensable for the human psychism; in any case, its absence brings about
incomparably worse abuses than its presence, for it is better to have good
dreams than to have nightmares. Be that as it may, only religion, or
spirituality, offers that integral meaning and happiness anchored in man’s
deiform nature without which life is neither intelligible nor worth living.”
(p. 78)
An easy argument against religions is the following: the
religions and denominations contradict one another, hence they cannot all be
right; consequently none is true. It is as if one were to say: every individual
claims to be “I”, hence they cannot all be right; consequently, no one is “I”.
All of which amounts to asserting that there is but one single man to see the
mountain and that the mountain has but one single side to be seen.
He who is capable of becoming a saint but neglects to become
one cannot save anyone; it is hypocrisy pure and simple to hide one’s own
weakness and lukewarmness behind a screen of good works.
Being Conscious of the Real
The purpose of human intelligence, and consequently the
purpose of man, is the consciousness of the Absolute, beyond but also within
the consciousness of contingencies.
Faith is the intuition of the transcendent; unbelief stems
from the layer of ice that covers the heart and excludes intuition.
Accepting the will of Heaven means that we have to resign
ourselves to that which cannot but be, and resist all temptation to revolt
against destiny and against the nature of things. To the quality of resignation
is joined that of trust.
Egoism is the bias of not being able to bear any injustice.
“Discernment and contemplation; concentration and
perseverance; resignation and trust; humility and charity. Spirituality is what
man is: being made of intelligence, will and sentiment – all three faculties
having the principal quality of objectivity on pain of not being human –
spirituality has as its constitutive elements the Truth, the Way and Virtue;
Virtue give rise to the two complementary poles of humility and charity,
precisely. The Way is attached to the Truth; Virtue is attached to both the
Truth and the Way.” (p. 85)
The Liberating Passage
From the standpoint of transcendence, there is quite
evidently a discontinuity between the Divine Principle and its manifestation;
but from the point of view of immanence, there is continuity.
When there is discontinuity, we distinguish between the
Essence and the form; when there is continuity, we distinguish between the
Substance and the accident.
The accident is a “mode” of the Substance, whereas the form
is a “sign” of the Essence.
The masculine pole refers to essentiality and to
transcendence, and the feminine pole to substantiality and to immanence.
A priori and grosso modo, Truth pertains to Rigor and to
Justice, and Path, to Gentleness and to Mercy.
In loving woman, man essentially loves Infinitude and
Goodness; woman, in loving man, essentially loves Absoluteness and Strength.
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