ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Knowledge and the Sacred Chapter Nine: Principal Knowledge and the Multiplicity of Sacred Forms Verily, to every people there has been sent a prophet. Quran I meditated upon religions, making great effort to understand them, And I came to realize that they are a unique Principle with numerous ramifications. Ḥallāj They worship me as One and as many, because they see that all is in me.

Bhagavad Gīta One of the paradoxes of our age is that the manifestation of religion in different worlds of form and meaning has been used by the already desacralized type of knowledge, which has dominated the mental outlook of Western man in recent times, to destroy further what little remains of the sacred in the contemporary world.

Modern man is encountering the other worlds of sacred forms and meaning in their full reality at the very moment when sacred knowledge and an interiorizing intelligence, which would be able to penetrate into the inner meaning of alien forms, having become so inaccessible.

The result is that the multiplicity of sacred forms, which is itself the most definitive evidence of the reality of the sacred and the universality of the truth that each universe of form and meaning transmits in its own manner, has been employed, by those who deny the reality of the sacred as such, to relativize what has survived of the Christian tradition.

The multiplicity of sacred forms has been used as an excuse to reject all sacred forms, as well as the scientia sacra which lies behind and beyond these forms.

Had the West encountered other religions in a serious manner while a veritable intellectual tradition in the sense understood here still survived in its midst, the results would have been very different from the spectacle that “comparative religion” presents to the modern world.1 For an intelligence which has been illuminated by the Intellect and a knowledge which is already blessed with the perfume of the sacred sees in the multiplicity of sacred forms, not contradictions which relativize, but a confirmation of the universality of the Truth and the infinite creative power of the Real that unfolds Its inexhaustible possibilities in worlds of meaning which, although different, all reflect the unique Truth.