Non Fiction Authors

"It is easy to criticize the "fanaticism" of our ancestors when one has lost the very notion of saving truth, or to be "tolerant" when one derides religion."

"Those who uphold the evolutionist argument of an intellectual progress are fond of explaining religious and metaphysical ideas in terms of inferior psychological factors, such as fear of the unknown, childish hope of a perpetual happiness, attachment to an imagery that has become dear, escape into dreams, the desire to oppress others at small expense, et cetera; how can one fail to see that such suspicions, shamelessly presented as proven facts, contain psychological inconsistencies and impossibilities, which cannot escape any impartial observer? If humanity has been stupid for thousands of years, one cannot explain how it could have ceased being so, all the more as this change occurred in a relatively brief time lapse; and one can explain it still less when one observes with what intelligence and heroism it has been stupid for so long and with what philosophic myopia and moral decadence it finally became "lucid" and "adult"."

"The world is miserable because men live beneath themselves; the error of modern man is that he wants to reform the world without having either the will or the power to reform man, and this flagrant contradiction, this attempt to make a better world on the basis of a worsened humanity, can only end in the very abolition of what is human, and consequently in the abolition of happiness too. Reforming man means binding him again to Heaven, reestablishing the broken link; it means tearing him away from the reign of the passions, from the cult of matter, quantity and cunning, and reintegrating him into the world of the spirit and serenity, we would even say: into the world of sufficient reason."

"It must be said that progressivists are not completely mistaken in thinking that there is something in religion that no longer works; the individualistic and sentimental argumentation with which traditional piety operates has all but lost its ability to grip man’s consciousness, and this is not simply because modern man is irreligious, but also because normal religious arguments − not being able to go deep enough into the core of things and in fact not having had to do so previously − are somewhat blunted, psychologically speaking, and fail to satisfy certain needs for causality."

"One of the effects, among others, of modern science has been that of mortally wounding religion by posing in concrete terms problems which esoterism alone can resolve and which remain unresolved because esoterism is not heeded and is heeded less now than ever. Faced by these new problems, religion is disarmed, and it borrows clumsily and gropingly the arguments of the enemy, and this obliges it to falsify its own perspective imperceptibly and disavow itself more and more; its doctrine is certainly not affected, but false opinions borrowed from its repudiators corrode it insidiously "from within", as witnessed by modernist exegesis, the demagogic leveling of the liturgy, Teilhardian Darwinism or the "sacred art" of surrealist and "abstract" persuasion."

"Religion translates metaphysical or universal truths into dogmatic language; now though dogma is not accessible to all men in its intrinsic truth, which can only be directly attained by the Intellect, it is nonetheless accessible through faith, which is, for the great majority, the only possible mode of participation in the Divine Truths. As for intellectual knowledge, which proceeds neither from belief nor from a process of reasoning, it goes beyond dogma in the sense that, without ever contradicting the latter, it penetrates its internal dimension, that is, the infinite Truth that dominates all forms."

"Without religion − or without authentic religion − a human collectivity cannot survive in the long run; that is, it cannot remain human."

"Every religious form is superior to the others in a particular respect, and it is this characteristic that in fact indicates the sufficient reason for the existence of that form."

"The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute, and consequently in the integrality and depth of this consciousness; having lost sight of it by plunging himself into the world of phenomena viewed as such, man needs to be reminded of it by the celestial Message. This Message comes finally from "himself", not of course from his empirical "I" but from his immanent Selfhood, which is that of God and without which there would be no "I", whether human, angelic or other; the credibility of the Message results from the fact that it is what we are, both within ourselves and beyond ourselves. In the depths of transcendence is immanence, and in the depths of immanence, transcendence."

"Let us specify that the possible gaps in the human mind are due, not to fortuitous causes, but to the very conditions of the "dark age", the kali-yuga, which has as an effect − among other modes of decadence − a progressive weakening of pure intellection and of the ascending tendencies of soul; whence the necessity of the religious revelations, and whence also the problematical phenomenon of gratuitous and divergent philosophies."

"Revelation is the fulgurant irruption of a knowledge that comes, not from an individual or collective subconscious, but on the contrary from a supra-consciousness, which though latent in all beings nonetheless immensely surpasses its individual and psychological crystallizations."

"There is no access to the Heart without the virtues."

"The desire to vanquish faults because it is "I" who have them is ineffectual, since it falls within the same category as the faults themselves. Indeed, every fault is a form of egoism or even pride. We must tend towards Perfection because we understand it and therefore love it, and not because we desire that our ego should be perfect. In other terms, we must love and realize a virtue because it is true and beautiful, and not because it would become us if we possessed it; and we must hate and fight against a fault because it is false and ugly, and not because it is ours and because it disfigures us. To possess a virtue is first and foremost to be without the fault which is contrary to it, for God created us virtuous. He created us in His image; faults are superimposed. Moreover it is not we who possess virtue, it is virtue which possesses us."

"Every virtue is a participation in the Beauty of the One and a response to His Love."

"Virtue is the conformity of the soul to the divine Model and to the spiritual work; conformity or participation. The essence of the virtues is emptiness before God, which permits the divine Qualities to enter the heart and radiate in the soul. Virtue is the exteriorization of the pure heart."

"Virtue is a ray of the divine Beauty, in which we participate through our nature or through our will, with ease or with difficulty, but always by the grace of God."

"There is no valid virtue without piety, and there is no authentic piety without virtue."

"Virtue consists in allowing free passage, in the soul, to the Beauty of God."

"The saint is the man who acts as if he had died and returned to life; having already ceased to be "himself" in the earthly sense, he has no intention whatever of returning to that dream, but maintains himself in a kind of wakefulness, which the world with its narrowness and impurities cannot understand."

"Sanctity is essentially contemplativity: it is the intuition of the spiritual nature of things; profound intuition which determines the entire soul, hence the entire being of man."

"In order to maintain the world in equilibrium, or in order even to improve it in a particular sector, it is not enough that there should be men capable of taking effective measures in keeping with spiritual principles, it is also necessary that there should be saints who, like the "motionless mover" of Aristotle, realize only the "one thing necessary", namely that which constitutes the reason for being of every human city."

"Holiness is the sleep of the ego and the wake of the immortal soul − of the ego, fed on sensorial impressions and filled with desires, and of the soul, free and crystallized in God. The moving surface of our being must sleep and must therefore withdraw from images and instincts, whereas the depths of our being must be awake in the consciousness of the Divine, thus lighting up, like a motionless flame, the silence of the holy sleep."

"Man prays, and prayer fashions man. The saint has himself become prayer, the meeting place of earth and Heaven; he thereby contains the universe, and the universe prays with him. He is everywhere where nature prays, he prays with her and in her: in the peaks which touch the void and eternity, in a flower that scatters its scent, or in the carefree song of a bird. He who lives in prayer has not lived in vain."

"What is the world if not a flow of forms, and what is life if not a cup which seemingly is emptied between one night and another? And what is prayer, if not the sole stable point − a point of peace and light − in this dream universe, and the strait gate leading to all that the world and life have sought in vain? In the life of a man, these four certitudes are all: the present moment, death, the meeting with God, eternity. Death is an exit, a world which closes down; the meeting with God is like an opening towards a fulgurating and immutable infinitude; eternity is a fullness of being in pure light; and the present moment is, in our duration, an almost ungraspable "place" where we are already eternal − a drop of eternity amid the to-and-fro of forms and melodies. Prayer gives to the terrestrial instant its full weight of eternity and its divine value; it is the sacred ship bearing its load, through life and death, towards the further shore, towards the silence of light − but at bottom it is not prayer which traverses time as it repeats itself, it is time which, so to speak, halts before the already celestial unicity of prayer."

"The gift of oneself to God is always the gift of oneself to all; to give oneself to God − though it were hidden from all − is to give oneself to man, for this gift of self has a sacrificial value of an incalculable radiance."

"The aim of individual prayer is not only to obtain particular favors, but also the purification of the soul: it loosens psychic knots or, in other words, dissolves subconscious coagulations and drains away many secret poisons; it externalizes before God the difficulties, failures and tensions of the soul, which presupposes that the soul be humble and genuine, and this externalization − carried out in the face of the Absolute − has the virtue of reestablishing equilibrium and restoring peace; in a word, of opening us to grace."

"Prayer − in the widest sense − triumphs over the four accidents of our existence: the world, life, the body, the soul; we might also say: space, time, matter, desire. It is situated in existence like a shelter, like an islet. In it alone we are perfectly ourselves, because it puts us into the presence of God. It is like a diamond, which nothing can tarnish and nothing can resist."

"Every time man stands before God wholeheartedly − that is, "poor" and without being puffed up − he stands on the ground of absolute certitude, the certitude of his conditional salvation and the certitude of God. And that is why God has given us the gift of this supernatural key that is prayer: in order that we might stand before Him as in the primordial state, and as always and everywhere; or as in eternity."

"The passage from distinctive or mental knowledge to unitive or cardiac knowledge follows from the very content of thought: either we understand imperfectly what the notions of Absolute, Infinite, Essence, Substance, Unity mean, in which case we content ourselves with concepts − and this is what is done by philosophers in the conventional sense of the word; or else we understand these notions perfectly, in which case they oblige us, by virtue of their very content, to transcend conceptual separativity in order to find the Real in the depths of the Heart, not as adventurers, but by availing ourselves of the traditional means without which we can do nothing and are entitled to nothing. Transcendent and exclusive Substance then reveals Itself as immanent and inclusive. It could also be said that since God is All that is, it behooves us to know Him with all that we are; and to know What is infinitely lovable − since but for Him nothing would be lovable − is to love Him infinitely."

"It is appropriate to distinguish between a knowledge that is active and mental, namely doctrinal discernment, by which we become conscious of the Truth, and a knowledge that is passive, receptive and cardiac, namely invocatory contemplation, by which we assimilate what we have become aware of."

"Only the science of the Absolute gives meaning and discipline to the science of the relative."

"Will for the Good and love of the Beautiful are the necessary concomitants of knowledge of the True, and their repercussions are incalculable."

"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."

"The principle of knowledge does not of itself imply any limitation; to know is to know all that is knowable, and the knowable coincides with the real, given that a priori and in the Absolute the subject and the object are indistinguishable: to know is to be, and conversely. If we are told that the Absolute is unknowable, this applies, not to our intellective faculty as such, but to a particular de facto modality of this faculty; to a particular husk, not to the substance."

"Starting from the axiom that all knowledge, by definition, comprises a subject and an object, we shall specify the following: the subject of the knowledge of sensible phenomena is obviously a particular sensorial faculty or the combination of these faculties; the subject of the knowledge of physical principles, or of cosmic categories, is the rational faculty; and the subject of the knowledge of metaphysical principles is the pure intellect and hence intellectual intuition; intuition or intellection and not discursive operation. A knowledge whose subject is not the intellect could not be metaphysical; starting from the observation of phenomena, one cannot reach a reality that only "God in us" can cause us to perceive. Three subjectivities, three modes of certitude: from the relative to the absolute."

"The divine Māyā − Femininity in divinis − is not only that which projects and creates, it is also that which attracts and liberates. The Blessed Virgin as Sedes Sapientiae personifies this merciful Wisdom that descends towards us and that we also bear in our very essence, whether we know it or not; and it is precisely by virtue of this potentiality or virtuality that Wisdom comes down upon us. The immanent seat of Wisdom is the heart of man."

"Wisdom consists not only in becoming detached from the reflections, but also in knowing and feeling that the archetypes are to be found within ourselves and are accessible in the depths of our hearts; we possess what we love to the extent that what we love is worthy of being loved."

"Wisdom consists not only in knowing truths and being able to communicate them, but also in the sage’s capacity to recognize the most subtle limitations or hazards of human nature."

"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 are not obvious for those who refuse to take them into consideration. It goes without saying that it is not a question here of the altogether outward data with which experimental science can provide us, but of realities with which this science does not deal, and cannot deal, and which are transmitted to us by quite different channels, especially those of mythological and metaphysical symbolism, not to mention intellectual intuition, the possibility of which resides principially in every man. The symbolic language of the great traditions of mankind may seem difficult and disconcerting for certain minds, but it is nevertheless intelligible in the light of the orthodox commentaries; symbolism − it must be stressed − is a real and rigorous science, and nothing is more aberrant than to believe that its apparent naivety issues from a crude and "prelogical" mentality. This science, which we may term "sacred," cannot be adapted to the experimental method of the moderns; the domain of revelation, of symbolism, of pure intellection, obviously transcends the physical and psychic planes and is thus situated beyond the domain of methods termed scientific. If we believe that we cannot accept the language of traditional symbolism because it seems to us fantastical and arbitrary, this only shows that we have not yet understood this language and certainly not that we have gone beyond it."

"The language of religion is symbolism, and symbolism is what both separates and unites. It is the symbolism that constitutes the particularity, at once enlightening and separative, characterizing the different religions, and it is symbolism yet again that on the contrary, owing to its universal validity and its illimitation in depth, permits one to reach the religio perennis; to bring out the oneness of the content − and the raison d’être − of the religious phenomenon."

"A symbolism is abstract inasmuch as it signifies a principial reality; it is concrete inasmuch as it communicates the nature of this reality, that is, inasmuch as it renders it present to our experience."

"The language of Sophia perennis is above all symbolism in all its forms, thus the openness to the message of symbols is a gift proper to primordial man and his heirs in every age."

"The principal cause of a lack of metaphysical understanding is not so much a fundamental intellectual incapacity as a passional attachment to concepts that are congruent with man’s natural individualism. On the one hand, transcending this individualism predisposes man to such an understanding; on the other hand, total metaphysics contributes to this transcending; every spiritual realization has two poles or two points of departure, one being situated in our thought, and the other in our being."

"Metaphysics intends to furnish dialectically only reference points; it offers − and this is its entire reason for being − a system of perfectly sufficient keys, through a language that cannot be other than indicative and elliptical."

"Gnosis is essentially the path of the intellect and thus of intellection; the motive force of this path is above all intelligence, not will and sentiment as is the case in the Semitic monotheistic mysticisms—including average Sufism. Gnosis is characterized by its recourse to pure metaphysics: the distinction between Ātmā and Māyā and the consciousness of the potential identity between the human subject, jīvātmā, and the Divine Subject, Paramātmā."

"The content of the universal and primordial doctrine is the following, expressed in Vedantic terms: "Brahma is Reality; the world is appearance; the soul is not other than Brahma". These are the three great theses of integral metaphysics; one positive, one negative, one unitive."

"Metaphysics is the science of the Absolute or the true nature of things."

"The whole question is knowing whether man possesses a "pre-logical" intuition of Substance or whether he is fundamentally bound up with accidentality; in the first case his intelligence is made for gnosis, and arguments − or imagery − confined to the accidental will ultimately have no hold upon him. For the average man, existence begins with man placed on earth: there is space, and there are things; there is "I" and "other"; we want this, and another wants that; there is good and evil, reward and punishment, and above all this there is God with His unfathomable wishes. But for the born contemplative, everything begins with Truth, which is sensed as an underlying and omnipresent Being; other things can be fully comprehended only through it and in it; outside of it the world is no more than an unintelligible dream. First there is Truth, the nature of things; then there are the consciousnesses that are its receptacles: man is before all else a consciousness in which the True is reflected and around which the True or the Real manifests itself in an endless play of crystallizations. For the contemplative, phenomena and events do not constitute a compact and naive postulate; they are intelligible or bearable only in connection with the initial Truth."

"The spiritual anthropology of authentic esoterism starts from the idea that man is defined by a total and "deiform" intelligence, whereas the common religion readily defines man as "sinner," "slave," even "nothing"; hence in accordance with the "fall" or with creaturely limitation alone, rather than with his inalienable substance or, consequently, with the "divine content"."

"There is no theophany that is not prefigured in the very constitution of the human being, made as it is "in the image of God"; and esoterism aims at actualizing what is divine in this mirror of God that is man."