(paperback)
Every “true” religion, truly revealed by God himself, has two sides that are closely interpenetrated: a divine and a human one. Religion means “reconnection”; and it means the reconnection of man to God. According to these two sides, every religion must on the one hand make use of a formal language or a cult that directly “shines” or is comprehensible to the people or peoples for whom it is intended. On the other hand, however, every true religion must, with the help of this “luminous” formal language, convey a divine Eternal Message that far exceeds the people or peoples concerned: This divine side of religion is what Schuon calls the Sophia perennis in the present book, in German the treasure of the eternally unchanging divine wisdom. This wisdom cannot in itself be expressed in any form, concept or word, but it can, with the correct handling given by God himself, make a divine string vibrate in us, awaken an inkling of the last and prepare the inner spiritual upswing for the show of the spiritual reality which is above all limited. It follows from what has been said that the great religions, seen from the outside, i.e. from the human side, are largely different from one another, according to the diversity of the peoples, races and ages to which they turn. Inwardly, however, seen from the divine side, they are equal, passing on the same never-changing core of Sophia perennis, Eternal Wisdom. This transmission is called “tradition”. One could compare the spiritual core of all traditions with a star, from which the individual world religions diverge like rays in different directions, the closer they are to the centre, the closer they are to each other.
