First published in Vincit Omnia Veritas (1.2, 2005), this essay by Timothy Scott offers an overview of how traditionalist/perennialist writers think in regard to traditional art. Citing mostly A.K. Coomaraswamy and Schuon, Scott familiarizes the reader with the central concepts necessary to understand how these writers view traditional art, and thus modern art by contrast. He concludes: "In the final analysis Traditional art can be summed up thus: God, in creating the Universe, is the Divine Artist. The human is made in the image of God. Thus everything we do is an act of creation and a work of art. The Divine art is the creation of the human; the art of the human is, as a reflective image, the 'creation' or recognition of the Divine. This is the purpose and the end of humankind. All art is strictly a science and a craft. In its highest form it is the science and craft of the Beautiful, the Ideal or principle of all beauty. Its purpose is always the return of the human to the Origin through contemplation, meditation, and action, which find their perfection in participation."

"This paper considers the idea of the elite, or elect, with respect to the problems of Predestination and the notion of the exclusivity of esotericism. It is our opinion that the questions raised here can only be resolved in light of the metaphysical knowledge that is the proper subject of esotericism, where, as said, this is understood as the sophia perennis. Frithjof Schuon stands as the pre-eminent voice of the sophia perennis for our day and age and it is thus that this paper is largely a reiteration of what he has said on these points. For himself, Schuon would undoubtedly admit that what he has said is in turn a reiteration of the perennial teachings of the world’s great Traditions."

Timothy Scott summarizes the theme of his essay in this way: "Traditional symbolism is the formal language of the Divine to the human. It is like a treasure house of the world’s sacred knowledge. However, in light of rampant modern confusions, the idea of the symbol has been robbed of its transcendent value and mangled into something trapped within the lower realms of our psychic being. The modern symbol is become something of the 'sub-conscious' which, if this has any meaning at all, implies something subhuman. Furthermore modern symbolism has degenerated into an arbitrary game rather than the exact science of Traditional understanding. It is not my intention [in this essay] to provide a critique of the modern understanding of symbol but rather to offer an exposition of the Traditional view of 'symbol.'"

Excerpted from the anthology The Betrayal of Tradition, "This essay presents a comparison of the religious and the modern understandings of the nature of Reality. The aim is to show that it is only from the metaphysical perspective–the intellectual understanding of the religious viewpoint–that Reality can be understood in a manner that is logically sound. According to this position faith is fundamental to an understanding of the nature of Reality."

In this article Timothy Scott presents a detailed cosmogonic reading of a New Testament passage referring to Christ’s “emptying” or kenosis: “he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human beings are” (Philippians 2:7). Scott draws on the Jewish Kabbalistic doctrine of tsimtsum (the “concentration” of En-Sof, the “Limitless” or Divine Infinitude), the Islamic Sufi idea of fana (“extinction”), and the Hindu and Buddhist notion of nirvana to present an alternative to the creatio ex nihilo (“creation out of nothing”) argument.