Paradoxes of the Highest Science

Eliphas Levi

• Publisher: Youcanprint
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9788892698055
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

MANY paths lead to the mountain-top, and many and diverse are the rifts in the Veil, through which glimpses may be obtained of the secret things of the Universe.
The Abbé Louis Constant, better known by his nom de plume of ÉLIPHAS LÉVI, was doubtless a seer; but, though his studies were by no means confined to this, he saw only through the medium of the kabala, the perfect sense of which is, now-a-days, hidden from all mere kabalists, and his visions were consequently always imperfect and often much distorted and confused.
Moreover, he was for a considerable portion of his career a Roman Catholic priest, and as such had to keep terms, to a certain extent, with his church, and even later, when he was unfrocked, he hesitated to shock the prejudices of the public, and never succeeded in even wholly freeing himself from the bias of his early clerical training. Consequently he not only erred at times in good faith, not only constantly wrote ambiguously to avoid a direct collision with his ecclesiastical chiefs or current creeds, but he not unfrequently put forward Dogmas, which, taken in their obvious straightforward meanings, he certainly did not believe--nay, I may say, certainly knew to be false.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Paradoxes of the Highest Science
• Preface To The 1922 Second Edition
• Foreword To The 1922 Second Edition
• Second Preface
• Paradox 1. Religion Is Magic Sanctioned By Authority
• Paradox 2. Liberty Is Obedience To The Law
• Paradox 3. Love Is The Realisation Of The Impossible
• Paradox 4. Knowledge Is The Ignorance Or Negation Of Evil
• Paradox 5. Reason Is God
• Paradox 6. The Imagination Realises What It Invents
• Paradox 7. The Will Accomplishes Everything, Which It Does Not Desire
• SYNTHETIC RECAPITULATION
• Magic And Magism
• The Great Secret
• Notes