Today is the birthday of the French mystic and scholar Rene Guenon.
He was a leading part of a school of thought, Perennialism, or the Traditionalist School, that while not well known outside the realm of religious studies has had considerable impact on contemporary religious thinking.
This school produced some prodigious thinkers, ranging from Frithjof Schoun to Ananda Coomaraswamy to Titus Burkhardt, to Seyyed Hossein Nasir to Huston Smith.
The Wikipedia article attempts to summarize Perennialism as defined by Guenon.
The French author René Guénon (1886-1951) was in a certain sense a pioneer in the rediscovery of this Philosophia Perennis or Sophia Perennis in the 20th century. His view, largely shared with later Perennialist authorities, is that “Semitic religions” have an exoteric/esoteric structure. Exoterism, the outward dimension of religion, is constituted by religious rites and a moral but also a dogmatic theology. The exoteric point of view is characterized by its “sentimental”, rather than purely intellectual, nature and remains fairly limited. Based on the doctrine of creation and the subsequent duality between God and creation, exoterism does not offer means to transcend the limitations of the human state. The goal is only religious salvation, which Guénon defines as a perpetual state of beatitude in a celestial paradise. In the Traditionalist view esoterism is more than the complement of exoterism, the spirit as opposed to the letter, the kernel with respect to the shell. Esoterism has, at least de jure, a total autonomy with respect to religion for its innermost substance is the Primordial Tradition itself. Based on pure metaphysics – by which Guénon means a supra-rational knowledge of the Divine, a gnosis, and not a rationalist system or theological dogma – its goal is the realization of the superior states of being and finally the union between the individual self and the Principle. Guénon calls this union “the Supreme Identity”.
By “Supreme Identity”, Guénon and Schuon do not refer to the personal God of exoteric theology but to a suprapersonal Essence, the Beyond-Being, the Absolute both totally transcendent and immanent to the manifestation. In their view the innermost essence of the individual being is non-different from the Absolute itself. Guénon refers here to the Vedantic concepts of Brahman (Transcendence), Atman (Self) and Moksa (Deliverance). For Guénon the Hindu Sanatana Dharma represents “the more direct heritage of the Primordial Tradition”. More generally the great traditions of Asia – (Advaita Vedanta, Taoism and Mahayana Buddhism) – play a paradigmatic function in his writings. He considers them as the more rigorous expression of pure metaphysics, this supra-formal and universal wisdom being, in itself, neither eastern nor western.
This view has informed contemporary religious studies more than is often noticed. As the Wikipedia article notes.
It could be argued that Traditionalism has a strong, although discreet, impact in the field of comparative religion and particularly on the young Mircea Eliade, although he was not himself a member of this school. Contemporary scholars such as Huston Smith, William Chittick, Harry Oldmeadow, James Cutsinger and Seyyed Hossein Nasr have advocated Perennialism as an alternative to secularist approach to religious phenomena.
A significant aspect of Perennialism or Traditionalism is its critique of modernity which is seen as so materialistic that the spiritual can barely be found. Critics of Perennialism have their own criticisms, particularly noting the school which claims a gnostic insight into a perennial teaching which they claim to know is essentially anti-democratic, anti-liberal and ultimately reactionary.
The school split in 1948 in a dispute between Guenon and Frithjof Schoun. Schoun would eventually immigrate to America where he and his organization have been the subject of controversy regarding sexual aspects of their spiritual activities. Nonetheless Schoun has remained a luminary thinker of the Traditionalist school.
I have to admit I like the Traditionalists and think there is something to what they’re about.
For me the most obvious problems with Traditionalism become apparent in Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions. For many people this book has been the introduction, often capital “T” The introduction to comparative religion. It is a good book, no doubt.
And its usefulness falls apart dramatically in the section on Buddhism. As a Traditionalist, Smith appears to feel a need to find theistic currents dominant in all religions. And so in the case of the Buddhist article he finds a few and then magnifies them to a point that misleads the reader – who, for the most part, is reading about religions outside their personal experience for the first time.
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