To Have a Center by Frithjof Schuon

Author:Frithjof Schuon [Schuon, Frithjof]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Tags: Religion, Essays, Philosophy, Esoteric, Metaphsics
ISBN: 9781936597505
Publisher: World Wisdom
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Hindu spirit, with the penetration and suppleness characterizing it, takes perfectly into account the distinguos which we have just mentioned, but at the cost of what is rightly or wrongly termed “polytheism”: wrongly, if by it one means that the supreme Principle is conceived as multiple, and rightly if one has in mind the more or less popular forms of worship, without forgetting the mythological symbolisms by which they are inspired.

Hinduism, whose genius consists in excluding nothing, also comprises that very particular mode of religion which is “gynecolatry”, not only because it admits of goddesses, but also and even above all because it practices, in one of its sectors, a monotheism in feminine mode.13 Let us specify that the basis of all “gynecotheism” is the deiformity of the human being: if man is “made in the image of God”, it is because God is in His way the transcendent prototype of man; now to speak of man, is also to speak of woman, since the human being comprises two sexes and since, quite obviously, woman is no less human than her masculine partner. Religious anthropomorphism gives rise to two perspectives: either one starts from the idea that man—the male—represents “totality” and thus includes woman, who is a “part”—since Biblically-speaking, Adam was before Eve—in which case Divinity is conceived in a masculine aspect, but not necessarily in an ostentatious manner; or else one starts from the idea that woman is “mother”, hence “creatrix”, and that moreover—or rather a priori—she manifests the Non-formal, the Infinite, the Mystery, in which case Divinity is conceived in a feminine aspect, or let us say, rather in its aspect of femininity. This second perspective is that of Shaktism; as for the first—“androtheism”—it is that of the three Semitic religions, with a certain exception in the case of Christianity which, without granting the Blessed Virgin the worship of “latria”, does grant her, and to her alone, the worship of “hyperdulia”, which practically, in spite of everything, amounts to a kind of divinization, if not “by right” at least “in fact.”14 In Hindu terminology, we would say that Mary is a feminine Avatāra of supreme degree, as is proven by her qualities of “Bride of the Holy Ghost” and “Co-Redemptress”, not to mention the epithet—problematical as it is—of “Mother of God”; and as is also shown by the practice of the Ave Maria, which derives from the worship of the Logos, and consequently from the cosmic prolongation of the divine Order.

But all these distinctions between boundaries are not solely a question of doctrinal perspective, they are also a matter of religious sensibility, and on this plane we shall not argue whether a given option is well-founded or on the contrary insufficient; for if on the one hand man chooses his God, on the other hand too, God chooses his man.

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