Religious revelation is both a veil of light and a light veiled.

Fallen man, and thus the average man, is as it were poisoned by the passional element, either grossly or subtly; from this results an obscuring of the Intellect and the necessity of a Revelation coming from the outside. Remove the passional element from the soul and the intelligence (remove "the rust from the mirror" or "from the heart") and the Intellect will be released; it will reveal from within what religion reveals from without.

 

This brings us to an important point: in order to make itself understood by souls impregnated with passion, religion must itself adopt a so to speak passional language, whence dogmatism, which excludes, and moralism, which schematizes; if the average man or collective man were not passional, Revelation would speak the language of the Intellect and there would be no exoterism, nor for that matter esoterism considered as an occult complement.

 

There are here three possibilities: firstly, men dominate the passional element, everyone lives spiritually by his inward Revelation; this is the golden age, in which everyone is born

an initiate.

 

Second possibility: men are affected by the passional element to the point of forgetting certain aspects of the Truth, whence the necessity - or the opportuneness - of Revelations that while being outward are metaphysical in spirit, such as the Upanishads.

 

Thirdly: the majority of men are dominated by passions, whence the formalistic, exclusive and combative religions, which communicate to them on the one hand the means of channelling the passional element with a view to salvation, and on the other hand the means of overcoming it in view of the total Truth, and of thereby transcending the religious formalism which veils it while suggesting it in an indirect manner. Religious revelation is both a veil of light and a light veiled.

 

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Esoterism as Principle and as Way by Frithjof Schuon

Done